Puzzles

Puzzles have existed for thousands of years. People throughout history have solved puzzles for enjoyment and for the mental challenge. Today, people throughout the world frequently complete a variety of popular word and number puzzles.

Word Puzzles

Simple word squares have existed for centuries. A word square consists of a group of words, all equal in length, arranged to form the same words across and down. The first known word square, called the Sator Square, originated in the first century and was carved in stone. It was found in Pompeii, Italy.

Another early word square is the Moschion stele, circa 300 CE. This puzzle was actually a hybrid of a cryptogram, word search, and crossword puzzle. Moschion, an Egyptian, created the stele to honor Osiris, and the words and messages within the puzzle can be read in different directions.

In the nineteenth century, puzzles began including clues. Clues were riddles at first, rather than definitions for the word in question. (Crosswords with riddles for clues, known as cryptic crosswords, have remained popular in the UK into the twenty-first century, but did not catch on in the United States.) In 1875, St. Nicholas magazine ran an early grid puzzle with answers which appeared horizontally and vertically (down and across). In nineteenth-century England, word squares began to develop into primitive crossword puzzles for children. In these puzzles, the clues were often pictures rather than words.

In December 1913, the New York World printed a puzzle called a "word-cross," by Arthur Wynne, an immigrant from Liverpool. Similar puzzles were soon featured weekly and became popular with readers. The puzzle's name gradually evolved into "crossword." Despite readers' enthusiasm, it was not until 1924 that anyone else tried to publish the puzzles on a large scale. Simon & Schuster produced a book of the puzzles published in World.

Though today the New York Times puzzle is probably the best known and most popular crossword puzzle, the paper was one of the last to yield to the crossword craze. It didn't publish a Sunday puzzle until 1942, and daily puzzles did not appear in the paper until 1950.

Number Puzzles

The most familiar number puzzle these days is certainly Sudoku, which is extremely popular in the United States. Its origins are not certain, but the puzzle is almost certainly based on the Magic Square, references to which first appeared around the ninth or tenth century in the writings of a scholar named Jabir ibn Hayyan. These magic squares consisted of nine cells with the numbers 1 to 9 arranged with 5 in the center so that the contents of each row, column and the two diagonals added up to 15.

Sudoku puzzles were first published in the late 1970s in Math Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine by Dell Magazines. Dell called their puzzles "Number Place." Though the concept of the magic square was not invented in Japan, the name "Sudoku" was. The puzzles became widely popular in Japan long before they gained much notice in Europe or the United States.

In 1984, Japan's leading puzzle producer, Nikoli, adopted Dell's "Number Place" puzzle in their own publications. The puzzles, which were first named Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru ("the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once"), quickly became popular. Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli, abbreviated the lengthy name to Sudoku. In Japanese, "Su" means "number" or "digit," and "Doku" means "single" or "not married."

Techniques

Puzzles of all varieties come in a wide variety of skill levels. It is advisable for the beginner to start with easier puzzles in order to learn the rules and procedures necessary to solve them successfully.

There are many puzzles available that are suitable for children as well as adults. Recent studies strongly suggest that solving puzzles can keep the brain performing optimally as people get older, and possibly even delay or prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Trends

In 1997, Crossword Weaver, the first computer software program for creating crossword puzzles, was patented by Variety Games, Inc. Though online forms of number and word puzzles sell very well today, newspapers and books remain the favored sources for new puzzles. In fact, the film Wordplay (2006) celebrated the New York Times crossword puzzle, and the many people who make it a daily practice.

Some other popular word games include:

• Word jumbles
• Word searches
• Cryptograms
• Acrostics
• Diagramless puzzles

Many number puzzles are also available in magazines, newspapers and books. Sudoku continues to gain in popularity, and collections of Sudoku puzzles can be found in most stores in printed or electronic form.

With the wide popularity of smartphones, many types of puzzles have become available in app form. Some companies that have historically published puzzles in print form have gone on to release puzzle apps, such as the New York Times, which released a crossword app in 2015.

Puzzles for Fun vs. Profit

There are a limited number of ways to make money from puzzles. Most people complete puzzles simply for enjoyment and the mental challenge. Creating puzzles can yield profit if yours are good enough to be purchased by a newspaper or other publication. However, quality puzzles take a great deal of time to create, so the return on investment is rarely large.

For real puzzle-solving pros, there are competitions for solving puzzles that award cash prizes. Some of these are run in newspapers and magazines, while others take place at events where competitors are judged on accuracy and speed in solving the puzzles.

Learning More

Organizations

American Crossword Puzzle Tournament <http://www.crosswordtournament.com/>

British Mensa <www.mensa.org.uk/mensa/puzzles.html>

Books

Carter, Philip. "400 Mind-bending IQ Puzzles." West Sussex, England: D&B Publishing, 2006.

Danesi, Marcel. An Anthropology of Puzzles: The Role of Puzzles in the Origins and Evolution of Mind and Culture. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Gardner, Martin. "My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles." Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994.

"The Giant 1001 Puzzle Book." New York: Random House, 2005.

Mepham, Michael. "The Book of Sudoku: The Hot New Puzzle Craze." New York: Overlook TP, 2005.

Salny, Abbie F., Frumkes, Lewis Burke, and Grosswirth, Marvin. "Mensa Think Smart Book: Games & Puzzles to Develop a Sharper, Quicker Mind." North Hollywood, CA: Galahad, 2006.

Shortz, Will. "The New York Times Monday Through Friday Easy to Tough Crossword Puzzles." New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002.