1925: Many newspapers claim that the crossword puzzle fad has passed. 1933: The word “crossword” appears in the Oxford English Dictionary. 1942: The New York Times finally begins their crossword puzzle legacy. The Farrar era, with Margaret Farrar as the crossword puzzle editor, lasts from 1942 to 1968.
1913: On Dec. 21, 1913, in a Sunday edition of The New York World, the first-ever “word-cross” puzzle appeared. The first-ever cruciverbalist, or person skilled in the creation or solving of crossword puzzles, was a journalist named Arthur Wynne from Liverpool, who’d immigrated to the states. A few weeks after the first word puzzle of its kind appeared, a typesetting error changed the name “word-cross” to “cross-word,” and it’s been called a crossword puzzle since.
Make a first pass in the other direction, usually starting with 1 Down, solving for the most obvious clues first and making sure there aren’t discrepancies. Find some obvious clues, and make sure they fit together when written out. Do your second pass, now with more letters to help you figure out new crossword answers.
Containers imply that you’ll need to insert a word inside of another word, usually indicated in the clue by words like “within” or “surrounding.”. Of course, it can even get harder, like metapuzzles, crosswords that unlock even more word puzzles, or Schrodinger puzzles, in which clues have more than one correct answer.
Tips for Understanding Crossword Clues. It can be hard to understand a crossword clue because crossword-writers are absolutely notorious for being cryptic. A good crossword player is typically a master riddle-solver, as one has to really think outside of the box to figure out some of these more difficult hints.
If your goal is to make your crossword easier for kids, take the time to try to think of alternative answers to your questions to make sure they’re not misleading .
Usually, crossword clues are written with no punctuation at all, so if you see a question mark, it implies that the answer won’t be as straightforward as you’d think. Think of puns, wordplay, homonyms, and less-obvious answers.