Happy 100th Birthday Crossword Puzzle!

This weekend, one of my favourite pastimes turned a century old! To celebrate 100 years of the crossword, an American culture icon, here are some interesting facts about crosswords taken from a speech I gave about crosswords for college last year.

The first crossword was invented in 1913 by a journalist called Arthur Wynne for the New York World. It was a diamond shape with no blackened out squares and easy clues.

Arthur Wynne called his game a "word-cross". The name was later changed to "cross-word", but then there was a typo one day and the hyphen was dropped, with the game becoming "crossword" as we know it.

Although the New York Times wasn't initially a big fan of the crossword, it would eventually publish its first Sunday crossword almost 20 years later in 1942, during World War II. An editor at the Times argued that they should published crosswords to give readers something do during the blackouts that happened after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

Now the New York Times' crossword is considered one of the most popular crosswords in America. The difficulty gets harder throughout the week, with the easiest on Monday and the most difficult on Saturday. Sunday's large puzzle is around the same difficulty as Thursday's puzzle.

Lots of celebrities are fans of the Times' Sunday crossword, including talk show host Jon Stewart and former President Bill Clinton, who can apparently finish one in 20 minutes!

Bill Clinton was also featured in one of the most famous crossword puzzles published in the New York Times on the day of the U.S. presidential election in 1996 between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. The answer to "Tomorrow's headline" could either be CLINTON ELECTED or BOBDOLE ELECTED, depending on how you filled in the answers going down.

In another cool crossword moment, a guy proposed to his girlfriend using the New York Times crossword. One of the answers was Paula Abdul's hit song "Will you marry me?" The crossword writer even managed to include the guy and his girlfriend's names in the crossword. She said yes!

The clue for the longest word ever used in a crossword is "Giggling troll follows Clancy, Larry, Billy and Peggy who howl, wrongly disturbing a place in Wales." The answer is: 

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch*

*a town in Wales