The First Crossword Runs in a Sunday Paper

On December 21, 1913, the New York World published a diamond-shaped word puzzle in its Sunday "Fun" section, built by staff journalist Arthur Wynne. Wynne, born in Liverpool in 1871, had emigrated to the United States in 1891, worked at the Pittsburgh Press, and eventually landed at the World in Manhattan, where his job was filling the humor page every week. His puzzle had a hollow diamond shape with the letters F, U, and N already filled in at the center, and numbered clues running down instead of the familiar rows and columns. He called it a "Word-Cross Puzzle." Readers wrote in for more, the World kept running them, and within weeks a typesetting slip flipped the name to "Cross-Word" for good.