Reports of the New York Times’ acquisition of Wordle rippled through social media earlier this week. Many were pleased that Josh Wardle was being compensated for his creation. Equally strong were dismayed voices which said it was going to vanish behind a paywall. As Jacobin’s Piper Winkler put it, “greed is a five-letter word”.
What’s heartening is that a word game has excited so much interest, with hundreds of thousands playing it daily. Wordle isn’t unique; there have been similar lexical puzzles over the years. In this case, however, as Wardle’s brother commented: “He decided not to do all the things you’re supposed to do to make a viral hit – like allowing people to play for hours or putting a hyperlink in the sharing function. It works because it’s atypical.”
The ability to share results on social media as distinctive coloured squares is another reason. So appealing is this aspect that Hemal Jhaveri, managing editor of Wired, jocularly tweeted: “If I were the NY Times, I’d make Wordle free to play but charge 99 cents to post your score on Twitter.”
The New York Times carries other daily word puzzles: there’s Spelling Bee and Letter Boxed, apart, of course, from their popular crossword. It’s ironic, then, that an article in the same newspaper in 1924 loftily wrote about “the utterly futile finding of words, the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern”.
A year later, they were still at it, proclaiming: “Fortunately, the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. The craze evidently is dying out fast and, in a few months, it will be forgotten.” It was only in 1942 that the paper’s first crossword appeared. (One of the clues: “Native Hindu in a British Army.” The answer: “Sepoy.”)
On the web or in print, the crossword has endured. It was created by Liverpudlian Arthur Wynne, the Josh Wardle of his time. In 1913, when he was in charge of the New York World’s colour supplement, he came up with a diamond-shaped set of squares with clues that ran across and down. He called this the Word-Cross Puzzle. In Thinking Inside the Box, her book on crosswords and their culture, Adrienne Raphel writes that he based it on word puzzles in children’s papers in England over the years. Lewis Carroll, too, had devised word games involving letter transformations.
This fascination with word puzzles can be traced back to at least the ancient Romans, who were delighted that the inverse of Roma was Amor. “Where there’s language, there will be language games,” Raphel aptly points out. “The relationship between arranging letters and thinking about language is hardwired.” A five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome known as the Sator Square was also found in the ruins of Pompeii, elements of which made their way into Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.
In the years after Wynne’s first puzzle, crosswords became something of an addiction. Among the consequences of this was the foundation of Simon & Schuster, the publishing firm. Their first published volume was a collection of crosswords with a sharpened pencil attached, which went on to sell 350,000 copies. Since its inception, the house has never not had a crossword book in print.
Raphel writes that such volumes, along with crossword championships, led booksellers to blame word games for the lagging sales of novels. In 1924, a Reuters report claimed: “Crossword puzzles and the radio have been given as the reason for a marked decline during the recent months in the demand for books at the Ottawa Public Library.”
Across the pond in England, crosswords were met at first with stoic indifference. Then, in 1925, Edward Powys Mathers came up with the first cryptic crossword in the Saturday Westminster Gazette. The clues were based on complex wordplay rather than definitions, providing the intellectual satisfaction of decoding them before arriving at answers.
Given their lexical nature, several writers took to crosswords like pen to paper, from T. S. Eliot to W.H. Auden, from Stephen King to Stephen Sondheim. In a literary echo of Wordle’s origin story, when Vera Nabokov was recuperating in a Black Forest sanatorium in 1926, Vladimir would send her daily letters from Berlin, often including crosswords he had devised, sometimes in the shape of butterflies.
Not surprisingly, references to crosswords also began to appear in fiction, especially detective novels. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse was fond of solving them; Captain Hastings muses over literary crossword clues in Agatha Christie’s Curtain; and in Ruth Rendell’s One Across Two Down, the central character is as obsessed with crosswords as he is with acquiring his mother-in-law’s fortune.
P.G. Wodehouse, too, was a cruciverbalist. In Ice in the Bedroom, Freddie Widgeon is overcome by “the feeling he had sometimes had when trying to solve a Times crossword puzzle, that his reason was tottering on its throne”. And in The Code of the Woosters, Madeline Bassett looks at Bertie Wooster “like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘emu’ in the top right-hand corner”.
Whether Wordle’s popularity will rise or decline after the New York Times takeover remains to be seen. For over a century, however, the crossword puzzle has been delighting devotees. Perhaps someone should think of a way to combine them. Crosswordle, anyone?
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