the.com/crossword
a tiny war between your ego and a stranger who knew you'd say guess.
means A puzzle grid in which you fill interlocking horizontal and vertical words by solving numbered clues.
from A transparent English compound of "cross" (words that cross one another in the grid) and "word." The puzzle itself is an early 20th-century invention — the first widely credited example ran in a New York newspaper in 1913 under the name "word-cross," which was soon flipped to "crossword." The word, in other words, is exactly as plain as it looks: words that cross.
- first one
- Arthur Wynne's 1913 puzzle was diamond-shaped, not square
- war effort
- Wartime Britain feared crosswords hid D-Day code names
- symmetry rule
- American grids must look identical rotated 180 degrees
- speed record
- Champions finish Monday puzzles in under two minutes
- brain perk
- Studies link regular solving to delayed memory decline
new york times crossword — daily puzzle published since 1942, most famous crossword in the world
guardian cryptic crossword — british newspaper crossword known for wordplay and anagrams, published since 1952
acrostic puzzle — word puzzle variant in ny times magazine where answers correspond to clues and grid positions