Everywhere he looks, Merl Reagle sees word puzzles.

A few minutes into our phone conversation, he stops mid-sentence. "Did you know that your last name anagrams perfectly into two different types of alcohol?"

I write my name on a sheet of paper, seeing "gin" immediately. "Rye" took me a second longer.

"I don't tell women named Kristen that their name anagrams to 'stinker' anymore," Reagle says. "They really don't like that."

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, a standard feature of newspapers across the country for decades. Merl Reagle is one of the most successful and acclaimed creators of crosswords, whose work is syndicated in over 50 newspapers. He's celebrating the anniversary with a new book of his greatest hits.

"The main reason people do them of course is for entertainment," says Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times, "but it's good to know when you're doing something fun it's also good for your mind." Studies have shown that people who regularly solve crossword puzzles or engage in other mentally challenging tasks can stave off degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

A small-time newspaperman named Arthur Wynne invented the first ever "word-cross" puzzle, which was published December 21, 1913 in the New York World.

Wynne's editors didn't like the puzzles that much, but allowed him to continue publishing new ones for nearly eight years. A few years after Wynne threw in the towel, the first book of crossword puzzles was published by Dick Simon and Max Schuster. The book sold 400,000 copies in just a few months, launching the Simon & Schuster publishing house.

Cool Crossword-Makers Across the Web ————————————

Subscription

AV Club

Fireball

Crossword Nation

Crooked

Free

Neville Fogarty

Erik Agard

Andy Kravis

Brendan Emmett Quigley

Matt Gaffney

Pete Muller

One century later, crosswords are still a beloved form of entertainment, although they're migrating from dead trees to the web. Reagle says that his puzzles used to be written in Times font, but with newspaper column inches growing more scarce, he's had to shift to Ariel Narrow. Meanwhile, Shortz says that more than 50,000 people subscribe to the Times' $40 per year online crossword puzzle service.

Besides being one of the best puzzle makers in the biz, Reagle at one point he was one of the fastest puzzle-solvers as well. In 1979, he took third place in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which Shortz directs.

Reagle says that it's taking longer these days to solve puzzles made by others, but that this has taught him to better appreciate the really good ones.

"I don't wanna be a speed-solver, anyway," he says. "I put a lot of work into these funny jokes in the puzzle. I don't want someone to just blast through it."

Tyler Hinman, a five-time winner of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, disagrees with Reagle about the speed-solving issue. He loves it. "If I'm really trying to go hard at it, I can do [a puzzle] in five minutes," Hinman says. His world-class speed, he says, isn't anything other than the result of practice making perfect: "I do a lot of puzzles."

"It's said that the people who are the best at these are musicians or people who are in math and science," Hinman says. "What those fields have in common is they're both about looking at encoded information and being able to translate it instantly into something meaningful."

That explanation would ring true for Dan Feyer, the reigning champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and an accomplished pianist.

Hinman, too, is an occasional contributor to The New York Times' crossword section. The most important part of designing a puzzle are the "fill words," he says, the easier words that can serve as keys to unlocking the tougher, longer answers. "They need to be gettable and fair. If you're going to include something obscure, it should at least be interesting."

"You want to make it relatively novel, something that hasn't been done before," Hinman says of crossword making. After 100 years, it might be more difficult than ever to do that. But it's likely they'll keep trying for another 100.