They are a fixture in daily newspapers, varying enormously in difficulty and complexity. Crosswords range from simple puzzles that provide amusement in waiting rooms and coffee-breaks to fiendish tests of intelligence that were even used to recruit code breakers during the second world war. But where and when did the modern crossword originate?

Arranging words in grids is a pastime that dates back centuries. The earliest known example of the Sator square, a Latin palindrome consisting of the words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, was found scratched on a wall in the buried Roman town of Pompeii. Word puzzles of various kinds appeared in 19th-century English publications. But the genesis of the modern crossword lies in the Sunday edition of the New York World published on December 21st, 1913. Arthur Wynne, a violinist-turned-journalist, created a word puzzle, called ‘Word-Cross’, for the paper’s ‘Fun’ supplement. It is the ancestor of all modern crosswords, but differs from them in several ways. For one thing, it is laid out on a diamond-shaped (rather than square) grid. Unlike many modern crossword puzzles, it contains no black squares. Its numbering system is also unfamiliar: rather than ‘2 across’, for example, it names clues using the numbers […]