Gina Asprocolas

Among the items that appeared in The New York Sunday World on Dec. 21, 1913: woman in Yonkers is robbed at gunpoint, aviator Glenn Curtiss vows to make the world’s first transatlantic flight and phone stocks rise after AT&T relinquishes its holdings of the Western Union Telegraph Company to mollify the Department of Justice. Next to these stories, the lighthearted Fun supplement introduced that day would not seem to be terribly newsworthy. Yet featured in “Fun” was the world’s first crossword puzzle, introduced as the “Word-Cross.”

Arthur Wynn, editor of the Fun section, “was determined to feature something new and special in the Christmas issue,” according to Michelle Arnot, author of “What’s Gnu: A History of the Crossword Puzzle.” His solution was a diamond-shaped grid that could be read both across and down. After settling on that format, he formulated the clues and answers that would populate the grid in the style that is now familiar to all of us.

Despite one editor’s note that the staff at the paper “regarded the game as ‘beneath a sensible man’s consideration,'” the puzzle was a hit with readers. Its popularity prompted another iteration the following week. Two weeks later, according to Will Shortz, the New York Times’ crossword editor, “a compositor accidentally transposed the words in the title to ‘Cross Word’ puzzle.” Since then, the name has remained unchanged.

Despite the widespread success of the puzzle, especially after the fledgling publisher Simon & Schuster came out with a collection of crosswords in 1924 (their very first book), The New York Times was one of the last remaining newspapers in the United States to run one. According to an opinion column, entitled “A Familiar Form of Madness,” which ran in the Times on Nov. 17, 1924, the crossword puzzle, “is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport: it merely is a new utilization of leisure by those for whom it otherwise would be empty and tedious. They get nothing out of it except a primitive sort of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.”

Almost two decades later, says Shortz, “as the story goes, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger had become tired of turning to the competing Herald Tribune for its crossword and decided The Times should have its own.” Margaret Farrer, who co-edited the original Simon & Schuster crossword collection as well as many following editions, was hired as the paper’s first crossword editor. Each New York Times crossword editor since has put their mark on the evolution of the puzzle. Will Shortz, the fourth person at the post, told me, “My goals have been to modernize the crossword vocabulary, reduce crosswordese and obscurity, introduce more playful themes and in general broaden the audience.”