Did you know that it’s been over one hundred years since the first crossword was created? Arthur Wynne, a Liverpudlian working in New York, was playing around with a puzzle for the Sunday edition of the New York World. He came up with a diamond-shaped puzzle with clues and squares in which to fill in letters. His first Word-Cross Puzzle was published on 21 December 1913, with the given word FUN.

The new word puzzle proved so popular that Wynne made it a regular weekly feature. When the New York World omitted it a few months later, there was an outcry and they had to return it.

Eleven years later, a young college graduate called Richard Simon was asked by his aunt where she could buy a book of crosswords. Simon was trying, with his college friend M Lincoln Schuster, to get into the publishing business, and they decided to publish the first ever crossword book.

The book was an overnight success. Simon and Schuster went on to become a major publisher, and a crossword craze swept across America. Crosswords reached Britain in the early 1920s and before long the first cryptic crossword was created.

The first person to create a cryptic crossword was English poet and translator Edward Powys Mathers, who used the pseudonym Torquemada and is credited with being the inventor. His clues were extremely obscure, but later compilers made easier cryptic crosswords. The Listener compiler Afrit (Alistair Ferguson Ritchie) set out basic rules of fairness in his book Armchair Crosswords. This is an extract:

‘We must expect the composer to play tricks, but we shall insist that he play fair. The Book of the Crossword lays this injunction upon him: “You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean.”’

An example of this is the clue, ‘Become pale when swallowing it’. It doesn’t have anything to do with swallowing something, but the word ‘when’ swallows the word ‘it’, it creates ‘wh-it-en’, so it says what it means.