August 3rd, 2009

Crossword Puzzle Games

A crossword is a puzzle which often has a rectangular or square shape, and which contains black and white cells. The white cells must be filled with words, according to the clues given, and the the black squares have the separation role. The white cells where the words should be inserted are called answers and the cells which belong to two words are called crossed. The "crossword" word comes from latin "cruciverbalism" which means "to cross words". The words can be filled in the white squares from left to right and from top to bottom.

There are many types of crosswords, but the most known types are the American style, the British and the Japanese ones. The American one is carachterised by few percentage of black squares and by the fact that most of the puzzles have 180 degrees rotational symmetry, the British one has many black squares and short words, and the Japanese one doesn't allow the corners to be black and the blacks to share a side.
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Puzzles have standard sizes, and for example, the puzzles published during the week in New York Times are 15x15, and the weekend ones are larger, with more than 20 squares on one side. The clues are very often outside the crossword grid, but in the Scandinavian style, they are in the black cells' place and they also have an arrow to point where the word should be positioned. The diacritics and capitalization are ignored when solving crossword puzzles, to avoid problems, and to allow a letter to easily belong to two words.Most of the puzzles have a theme, but there are crosswords with general knowledge words too.

The first known crossword was published by a journalist from England, Arthur Wynne, in Liverpool, in December 1913. In those times, it was very trendy to solve crosswords, because people thought you have a vast vocabulary and good general knowledge. There were many people who looked at crosswords with alarm, and said that this kind of game is a waste of time, and that it won't have a long life, but time shows us that they are pretty popular now too.

As a funny fact, you should know that crosswords were used also in the World War II, to send hidden messages. Records are registered also in the crossword field too, and the most puzzles published in the New York Times is held by Manny Nosowsky, who has had 241 puzzles published in that newspaper.

Although crossword is an english-language invention, there are crosswords in other languages too: French ones are smaller, the two letters are allowed, and the percentage of blacks is small; very interesting is the Japanese language crosswords, because due to the writing system, in the white cells there are written syllables and not letters, which makes the grid seem smaller than the classical ones.

Developing your vocabulary, enriching general knowledge and training your thinking speed are some of the crossword solving advantages, so if you have free time, try solving some crossword puzzle games! Also, these kind of games are useful in learning a foreign language.