I’m a huge lover of crossword puzzles. I became addicted from a very early age, 1950, when I sat watching my father curse and swear at the kitchen table when he couldn’t find a word he needed. Throughout my life I continued my interest and it has culminated in the current game Words with Friends, an online game. My better-half and I have been crazy for that game for more than 13 years with no end in sight. I’ve played hundreds of players and thousands of games and it’s been great fun and frustrating as crossword puzzles tend to be. Just recently I decided to do a little investigation into the history of crosswords. If you are a crossword addict then you might find this interesting. Here’s what I’ve discovered.
The game word-cross first appeared in December of 1913. Three weeks after the first puzzle appeared in the New York World newspaper, a type setter accidently reversed the name from “word-cross” to “cross word”. That newspaper folded in 1931 but by then dozens of newspapers constructed and ran their own weekly puzzles. By the early 1920’s, crosswords were popular in Great Britain, Germany, France, and Russia. In 1924, two New York entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. The story is told that Richard Simon’s aunt asked her nephew to find her a book of crossword puzzles. He couldn’t find one, so he started a company in partnership with Max Schuster and published the first crossword puzzle book. Americans then went crossword crazy. Simon & Schuster reprinted the book and sold more than a quarter-million copies in the first year, and their upstart company is now one of the largest publishing houses in the world.
My thanks goes out to the Hasbro Company and Zynga for keeping the interest in crosswords alive and well in both board games and a huge on-line presence.
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Give me a nine letter word for crossword puzzles!
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