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When it first appeared,
the crossword grid was shaped like a diamond; by the time it arrived
Britain in puzzle in Britain eleven years later, it had evolved
closer to the square that we are now familiar with. Soon after,
crossword puzzles became a regular feature in newspapers. The famous
Times crossword first appeared in January of the year 1930.
Since its beginning,
there have been puzzles of varying shapes, sizes and levels of
challenge. The cryptic type of crosswords was developed much later.
Some classic cryptic clues cited as HIJKLMNO for the five-letter
word water, the clue being H to O. Yet another is “Gegs” for
scrambled eggs.
One crossword puzzle
that made headlines was a crossword that had fifteen cubes, to be
solved across, down and through. It was compiled by an Englishman,
who took two years to create the same. There were three thousand
seventy five empty spaces that needed to be filled.
Crosswords became such a
rage that there are many interesting anecdotes are attributed to the
crossword mania. It is said that once a Pittsburgh clergyman put up
a crossword on the blackboard for his congregation asking them to
solve the puzzle before his sermon; the text for the next sermon lay
in the answers. Yet another crossword buff used to time his cooking
to coincide with the time taken to solve the daily puzzle. A friend
tried the same but soon wrote a letter of complaint to a daily
stating that his eggs had burst but he had been unable to solve the
puzzle; a period of seven hours had passed since he began working on
the answers to the clues.
Crosswords were banned
in Paris during the Second World War, for fear of being misused. In
fact, some editors were pulled up by the authorities when there
happened weird coincidences such as these. Two days prior before an
escape from the Wormwood Scrubs prison by a famous spy, a crossword
had included the name of the road outside the prison. Similarly, a
crossword compiler was quizzed because some secret codes used by the
authorities appeared as solutions within a span of thirty days. |
