More than half a century ago, a Talk of the Town piece in this magazine confidently dated the height of “the great crossword puzzle craze” to 1924. But the linguistic pastime had proved remarkably persistent, the piece observed: “though they are not much talked about nowadays, they continue to have their millions of ardent addicts.”

A fair number of those addicts have worked at The New Yorker. (What better way to procrastinate when facing a deadline?) We débuted a crossword puzzle once before, two decades back—a so-called cryptic crossword, a fiendishly difficult variation more commonly played in the U.K. than in the U.S. Our cryptic had an unusual shape: we tucked it into a single column, a third of a page, in the magazine. Knowing that the form was unfamiliar to many of our readers, we also offered “The New Yorker’s Guide to Solving Cryptic Crosswords,” two thousand words of explanation available to anyone who sent us a self-addressed stamped envelope or a fax number. The lucky few who already had e-mail addresses could request instructions electronically.

Most of our readers have e-mail addresses now, and the Web has given us the space to try new things—and to try old things again. In that spirit, we’re launching another crossword, online this time, and in the American style. It’ll be weekly, just like the magazine: a new one every Monday morning. Five constructors will take turns crafting the puzzles; they are crossword experts whose answers and clues exhibit the same qualities we aim for in all of our writing: wit, intelligence, a wide-ranging interest in the world, and a love of language. If you have any questions about how the puzzle works, you don’t need to mail us an envelope: just visit the F.A.Q.

The great Richard Wilbur, who died last fall, once published a poem in The New Yorker about doing a crossword—“a ghostly grille / Through which, as often, we begin to see / The confluence of the Oka and the Aare”—on a train. “It is a rite / Of finitude,” he wrote, “a picture in whose frame / Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once / Into the ABCs of every day.” Even if you find that you have to look up a few words (oast: “a usually conical kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco”), we hope that the ritual provides you with some pleasurable procrastination.

Play the first crossword here.