DAILY CODE

Newspapers started printing a crossword every day in 1924, eleven years after the crossword was invented, and not at the paper that invented it. The first daily crossword ran in the New York Herald Tribune, while the New York World, which had published the very first one, was still running its puzzle once a week on Sunday.

That gap is the whole story of the daily puzzle. Nobody set out to ration puzzles. The rhythm came from the container, because a newspaper arrives once a day, and it turned out to suit the thing so well that the format outlived the paper it was printed on, absorbed puzzle types nobody had invented yet, and ended up being used, once, to find people who could break ciphers.

Key Takeaways

• The modern crossword was invented by Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool-born journalist, and printed in the "Fun" section of the New York World on 21 December 1913.
• For the next ten years the World was the only paper running one, and it ran weekly. It was never copyrighted or trademarked.
• The first daily crossword appeared in 1924, in the New York Herald Tribune, the same year Simon and Schuster published the first crossword book.
• The daily slot was taken seriously enough that, on the NSA's own published account, a 1942 Daily Telegraph speed-solving contest was cover for recruiting to Bletchley Park.

Where did the daily puzzle come from?

From a Sunday supplement, slowly.

Arthur Wynne, an immigrant from Liverpool working as a journalist in New York, put a diamond-shaped word puzzle into the "Fun" section of the New York World for 21 December 1913. He called it a Word-Cross. It had no blacked-out squares, and its clues were numbered by the start and end of each answer rather than split into across and down lists. It also banned two-letter words, which is the one feature of that first grid that became standard everywhere.

Readers wrote in immediately asking for more. The World obliged, and then did nothing else with it for a decade. As the cryptologist Jeffrey Knisbacher records, for the next ten years the World was the sole publisher of crosswords, and for reasons nobody has established the puzzle was never copyrighted or trademarked.

That decision, or that oversight, is why the format is everywhere.

Why was the first crossword a weekly?

Because it lived in the Sunday magazine, and the Sunday magazine came out on Sunday.

There is a lovely first-hand account of this. Margaret Petherbridge, who was made "unwilling Cross Word Puzzle Editor" of the World around 1922, wrote up her own negligence for the 1924 puzzle book. Her original editing process, she admits, "was limited to picking out a good-looking one from among the bunch and sending it upstairs to be set", and the "letters of anathema and condemnation that came in by the dozens" had little effect on her, since they were "evidently from cranks".

What reformed her was the columnist F. P. A. moving into the next room and "stalking in every Monday morning bright and early (about eleven o'clock) to point out to me in sarcastic tones just what was wrong with yesterday's". She started solving her own puzzles on the page proof, and signs off pointing readers at "the cross word puzzle found each Sunday on the World Magazine's Ingenuities Page".

Each Sunday. In 1924, months before the crossword craze that would sell 400,000 books in a year, the puzzle was still a weekly.

What turned a Sunday feature into a daily puzzle?

Money, and a very good year.

1924 is the hinge. Simon and Schuster, then a new firm, published a collection of the World's puzzles. The University of Florida's Recess! Media puts the result plainly: sales reached 40,000 within three months, and within a year three volumes had sold more than 400,000 copies between them. Simon and Schuster became a publishing giant on the back of it.

Every other paper now wanted one, and nobody owned the idea. On Knisbacher's account, the New York Herald Tribune went further than copying the World and printed a crossword every day. Here is how the format then spread.

Year	What happened
1913	First crossword, New York World, weekly, Sunday
1922	First crossword published in Britain, in a magazine
1924	First daily crossword, New York Herald Tribune
1924	First crossword book, Simon and Schuster; Sunday Express runs Britain's first newspaper crosswords
1930	A crossword appears in the New York Times
1942	The New York Times institutes a regular Sunday puzzle
1950	The New York Times begins running a crossword every day
1960s	The New York Times daily puzzle is syndicated to papers across the country

The New York Times is the interesting holdout. A crossword appeared there in 1930, but it was 1942 before the paper committed to a regular Sunday puzzle and 1950 before it ran one every day. Its daily puzzle has been syndicated nationally since the 1960s.

Why one a day, rather than as many as you like?

Because the paper came once a day, and nobody had any choice about it.

This is the part worth sitting with. The daily puzzle did not begin as a piece of design. It began as an artefact of the printing schedule, in a market Knisbacher describes as the heyday of sensationalism and wild publicity, when, with no competition from other media, almost every large city had multiple newspapers competing for readers. A feature you could only get by buying tomorrow's paper was worth having.

What nobody expected was that the constraint would turn out to be the feature. One puzzle a day means everybody who does it is doing the same one, which is the only reason the question "how did you go on today's?" makes any sense. It also means the puzzle ends. You finish it, and then there is no more, which a bottomless supply can never offer.

The slot then outlasted every technology that made it necessary. The New York Times syndicated its daily puzzle across the country in the 1960s, and the space kept absorbing new puzzle types rather than closing.

Sudoku is the clearest case. The publisher Nikoli found the grid in an American puzzle magazine under the name Number Place and put it in front of Japanese readers in 1984. Its Japanese title was too long, so it was shortened to Sudoku, and it arrived in the west with the daily rhythm already fitted.

Nothing forces a website to serve one puzzle a day. The limit is now chosen on purpose, which is a strange fate for an accident of the presses. Why a chosen limit still works on people is a separate question, and the daily games hub takes that one on.

When a daily puzzle became a job interview

Early in 1942 the Daily Telegraph ran an advertisement offering to donate one hundred pounds to the Minesweeping Fund if anyone could solve its crossword in under twelve minutes under controlled conditions.

The offer was a front. As Knisbacher writes in the NSA's Cryptologic Quarterly, the contest "was a ploy to recruit intelligence agents to work on enemy ciphers at Bletchley Park", and on his account the half dozen or so successful entrants joined the team working on the German Enigma, an effort that was by then already years old and reading traffic.

It is the strongest claim anyone has made for the daily puzzle slot: that a newspaper's crossword was a serviceable aptitude test for wartime codebreaking. For what those recruits were walking into, the Bletchley Park story covers the rest.

How the daily puzzle split in two

Britain took the format and turned each clue into a small cipher.

The first crossword appeared there in a magazine in 1922, and in 1924 the Sunday Express was persuaded to run them in a newspaper, the first of those co-authored by Wynne himself. British solvers found the American form too American. They rewrote the clues for British usage, and some papers dropped the black squares in favour of heavy bars marking the word boundaries, giving the barred grid still used by the hardest puzzles.

Then came the cryptic clue, in which every clue carries a straight definition plus a second, encoded route to the same answer built from anagrams, hidden words and letter substitutions. That is a genuinely cryptographic idea: the clue conceals its answer by a stated rule the solver has to work out, which is exactly what a cipher does to a message. By 1926, working to rules laid down by A. F. Ritchie and D. S. Macnutt, the cryptic had become a British staple, and the Observer had hired a full-time setter who took the pseudonym Torquemada. His real name was Edward Powys Mathers.

Setters have used pen names ever since, which says something about how the daily puzzle slot came to be treated: not as filler, but as something with an author. It is a short step from a setter hiding an answer inside a clue to a newspaper hiding a message inside an alphabet.

Prefer your daily puzzle behind a single scrambled alphabet rather than a different cipher every day? The daily cryptogram hides one quote behind one shuffled alphabet.

Frequently asked questions

What was the first crossword puzzle?

A diamond-shaped grid by Arthur Wynne, printed in the "Fun" section of the New York World on 21 December 1913 and called a Word-Cross. It had no blacked-out squares and numbered its answers by their first and last cells rather than splitting them into across and down lists. Its one rule that survives everywhere is the ban on two-letter words.

Which newspaper printed the first daily crossword?

The New York Herald Tribune, in 1924. The New York World had invented the crossword eleven years earlier but was still running it weekly in its Sunday magazine, so the paper that created the puzzle did not create the daily puzzle slot. The New York Times did not institute a daily crossword until 1950.

Why did crosswords take off in 1924?

Because a new publisher gambled on a book of them. Simon and Schuster collected the World's puzzles and sold 40,000 copies in three months, and more than 400,000 across three volumes inside a year. The crossword had never been copyrighted, so every rival paper was free to print one, and the daily slot appeared in the scramble that followed.

Did a crossword really recruit codebreakers?

According to the NSA's Cryptologic Quarterly, yes. In early 1942 the Daily Telegraph offered one hundred pounds to the Minesweeping Fund if anyone could solve its crossword in under twelve minutes under supervision. That journal's account is that the competition was cover for recruiting to Bletchley Park, and that about half a dozen of those who passed went on to work on Enigma, which the Park had already been breaking for some time.

Why are cryptic crosswords British?

Because British setters deliberately made the imported puzzle harder. After the crossword reached Britain in 1922 they rewrote it for British usage, sometimes replacing black squares with bars, and added a second layer to every clue built from anagrams, puns and wordplay. By 1926 the cryptic was standard there, with rules attributed to A. F. Ritchie and D. S. Macnutt and setters working under pseudonyms.

Sources

• Jeffrey Knisbacher, From Crosswords to High-Level Language Competency, Cryptologic Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2005, declassified and released by the NSA. Canonical address https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jun/29/2002751625/-1/-1/0/FROM_CROSSWORDS.PDF - that host refused the request, so this was read from the archived copy, retrieved 10 August 2026
• Nikoli, Sudoku - the publisher's own account of finding the grid in an American magazine as Number Place, running it from 1984 and shortening the Japanese title; retrieved 10 August 2026
• Prosper Buranelli, F. Gregory Hartswick and Margaret Petherbridge (eds), The Cross Word Puzzle Book, The Plaza Publishing Company, New York, 1924 - Petherbridge's preface, "Confessions of a Cross Word Puzzle Editor", full text on the Internet Archive, retrieved 10 August 2026
• The Cross Word Puzzle Book, Third Series, 1924 - the preface on the hard-versus-easy schism among solvers, and the endorsement of the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, full text on the Internet Archive, retrieved 10 August 2026
• Recess! Media, Department of English, University of Florida, The First Crossword Puzzles - retrieved 10 August 2026
• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, Arthur Wynne and the first crossword, excerpted by permission from Sik Cambon Jensen's thesis - retrieved 10 August 2026