The first book of crossword puzzles was published by Simon & Schuster in 1924, after a suggestion from co-founder Richard Simon's aunt. Various thumbnail views are shown: Crosswords that share the most words with this one (excluding Sundays): Unusual or long words that appear elsewhere: Other puzzles with the same block pattern as this one: Other crosswords with exactly 17 blocks, 60 words, 120 open squares, and an average word length of 6. The "Swedish-style" grid (picture crosswords) uses no clue numbers, as the clues are contained in the cells which do not contain answers.
Today, Gorski and Joline are among the paper's most prolific living female Sunday puzzle constructors. Play in the Classroom. The straight definition is "add up", meaning "totalize". "[34] and in 1929 declared, "The cross-word puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads.... "[35] In 1930, a correspondent noted that "Together with The Times of London, yours is the only journal of prominence that has never succumbed to the lure of the cross-word puzzle" and said that "The craze—the fad—stage has passed, but there are still people numbering it to the millions who look for their daily cross-word puzzle as regularly as for the weather predictions. Puzzle whose grid has no black squares. History of Playing Cards. The answer could have been "ClintonElected" or "BobDoleElected. " Modern Hebrew is normally written with only the consonants; vowels are either understood, or entered as diacritical marks. As these puzzles are closer to codes than quizzes, they require a different skillset; many basic cryptographic techniques, such as determining likely vowels, are key to solving these. Credit a New York World editor named Arthur Wynne, who in 1913 created a blank-in-the middle diamond-shaped grid with no black squares. This kind of puzzle should not be confused with a different puzzle that the Daily Mail refers to as Cross Number. "The counter-effect of that, I suppose, was that these restrictions made it much harder to construct.
1] This has led U. S. solvers to use the day of the week as a shorthand when describing how hard a puzzle is: e. g. an easy puzzle may be referred to as a "Monday" or a "Tuesday", a medium-difficulty puzzle as a "Wednesday", and a truly difficult puzzle as a "Saturday". Then the competition begins! This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport... [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development. Please share this page on social media to help spread the word about XWord Info. The clue to the middle answer across the grid was "Lead story in tomorrow's newspaper. " English-language cipher crosswords are nearly always pangrammatic (all letters of the alphabet appear in the solution). Puzzle whose grid has no black squares Crossword Clue Universal - News. The first half of the week for the Times.
Another unusual theme requires the solver to use the answer to a clue as another clue. She began constructing puzzles in 1976, when New York City's alternate-side parking rules pushed her to spend several hours a week sitting in her car: she went through so many New York Times crosswords that she started creating her own. His first, framed and on a wall in his North College Hill home in Cincinnati, focused on Led Zeppelin's song "Stairway to Heaven. " Another Barnard crossword star was Joy Lattman Wouk '40, who died on September 29. They're his answers. Puzzles are often one of several standard sizes.
Called a word cross, it was diamond shape with no black squares. In her family, crosswords are a big deal during the holidays. No matter how puzzling, Andrew Reynolds '10 is passionate about his favorite pastime. The answer to that clue is the real solution. Published under various trade names (including Code Breakers, Code Crackers, and Kaidoku), and not to be confused with cryptic crosswords (ciphertext puzzles are commonly known as cryptograms), a cipher crossword replaces the clues for each entry with clues for each white cell of the grid—an integer from 1 to 26 inclusive is printed in the corner of each. Theme wasn't exciting enough or was. 8] After the player has correctly solved the crossword puzzle in the usual fashion, the solution forms the basis of a second puzzle. Swedish crosswords are mainly in the illustrated (photos or drawings), in-line clue style typical of the "Swedish-style grid" mentioned above. Crosswords with kanji to fill in are also produced, but in far smaller number as it takes far more effort to construct one. "Fabulous, " says veteran crossword constructor Elizabeth C. Gorski '76, whose work appears regularly in The New York Times and many other publications.
By V Sruthi | Updated Jul 27, 2022. During long trips from his childhood home in Holland, Mich., his family would pass a Times puzzle book around the car. These are common crossword variants that vary more from a regular crossword than just an unusual grid shape or unusual clues; these crossword variants may be based on different solving principles and require a different solving skill set. All clues for a given row or column are listed, against its number, as separate sentences. The movement of a couple black squares to produce the final grid is somewhat surprising feature, IMO. Puzzle has 3 fill-in-the-blank clues and 0 cross-reference clues. In both cases, no two puzzles are alike in construction, and the intent of the puzzle authors is to entertain with novelty, not to establish new variations of the crossword genre. As a result, the following ways to clue abbreviations and other non-words, although they can be found in "straight" British crosswords, are much more common in American ones: Many American crossword puzzles feature a "theme" consisting of a number of long entries (generally three to five in a standard 15×15-square "weekday-size" puzzle) that share some relationship, type of pun, or other element in common.
Psychological Benefits of Play. An acrostic is a type of word puzzle, in eponymous acrostic form, that typically consists of two parts. In October 1922, newspapers published a comic strip by Clare Briggs entitled "Movie of a Man Doing the Cross-Word Puzzle, " with an enthusiast muttering "87 across 'Northern Sea Bird'!!??!?!!? Some of these puzzles follow the traditional symmetry rule, others have left-right mirror symmetry, and others have greater levels of symmetry or outlines suggesting other shapes. Refine the search results by specifying the number of letters. Play and Learning Theory. Examined mental acuity for adults in their 50s and 60s. From such a perspective, Swedish crossword-makers have a far easier task. With a fully symmetrical grid, a single black starter square usually hints at the position of three or seven other black squares (the exact number will depend on whether or not the black square in question lies on an axis). Crossword puzzles became a regular weekly feature in the New York World, and spread to other newspapers; the Pittsburgh Press, for example, was publishing them at least as early as 1916[24] and The Boston Globe by 1917. Given their pangrammaticity, a frequent start point is locating where 'Q' and 'U' must appear. Some crossword clues, called straight or quick clues, are simple definitions of the answers. This tradition prospered already in the mid-1900s, in family magazines and sections of newspapers. Wargames Research Group.
The second part is a long series of numbered blanks and spaces, representing a quotation or other text, into which the answers for the clues fit. Other types of themes include: The Simon & Schuster Crossword Puzzle Series has published many unusual themed crosswords. Central American Nations. Japanese prime minister Taro Aso, who took office in late September, probably never saw it coming. One of the smallest crosswords in general distribution is a 4×4 crossword compiled daily by John Wilmes, distributed online by USA Today as "QuickCross" and by Universal Uclick as "PlayFour". Similarly, FAMILY TREE would not be appropriate unless it were used as a revealer for the theme (frequently clued with a phrase along the lines ".. a hint to... "). The grid system is quite similar to the British style and two-letter words are usually not allowed. Like most constructors, Reynolds creates puzzles for fun, not money.
In languages other than English, the status of diacritics varies according to the orthography of the particular language, thus: Person solving a Finnish crossword puzzle. A standard crossword grid is 15 squares by 15 squares, some white, some black. In more difficult puzzles, the indicator may be omitted, increasing ambiguity between a literal meaning and a wordplay meaning. Questions answers and comments about crossword construction. Any given set of answers might have zero, one, or multiple legal arrangements. She will be leading a session on "Light Hearts, Full Minds: The Benefits of Playfulness in Adulthood" at the Alumni Association's Winter College Feb. 27–March 1 in Charleston, S. C. Studies suggest that regularly.
Substantial variants from the usual forms exist.