Crossword
крестословица
A grid of cells filled with words from short clues, so that every crossing agrees on its letter.
A crossword is a of cells filled with words from short . The words run across and down and share their cells: where two words meet, one letter has to serve both.
That condition is what makes the puzzle solvable. One word found hands its letters to its neighbours, and they in turn suggest the next; a wrong answer sooner or later fails to agree with somebody else's letter and gives itself away. So a crossword is solved not in order but from wherever you are certain.
A clue works differently from a dictionary entry. It need not be complete, and is often deliberately spare: "capital on the Tiber", "unit of length", "what you write with". Precision is not asked of it — together with the the answer stays single anyway.
Where it came from
The first such puzzle was made for the Sunday supplement of the New York World and appeared on 21 December 1913 under the name Word-Cross: a diamond-shaped grid, no blocked cells, the clues listed at the side. Readers liked the shape, within a few years it had spread to other papers, and by the mid-1920s a paper without a crossword was the exception.
The forms it grew
Publications differed over how to present the clues and how densely to pack the grid, and differed far enough to produce separate puzzles.
The classic crossword left the clues in a list outside the grid and gave numbers the job of connecting the two. It is the commonest form, and the one meant when nobody says otherwise.
The cryptic went the other way: the clue stopped being a definition and became a small problem in which the answer is described twice over — plainly, and through play with its letters. Solving it is a different activity, and the machinery has to be known in advance.
The arrow-word did away with lists altogether, writing the clues into the grid and giving the direction with an arrow. It has more crossings and is markedly easier.
The relay is not a publisher's form but a way for a group to take one grid apart between them.
Neighbouring puzzles printed alongside — word searches, code-words, word chains — are built otherwise: they lack the clues, the crossings, or both, and are not crosswords however close they sit on the page.
Rules of the classic crossword
The grid
A rectangular field of cells. Working cells take letters; blocked cells separate the words. Words read left to right and top to bottom; none reads backwards.
The grid is connected: blocked cells must not cut it into parts with no word in common.
Every word crosses others at least twice — and in the American tradition at every one of its letters: each cell belongs to a word across and a word down, no word is shorter than three letters, and the pattern of blocked cells matches itself when the grid is turned half round.
Numbering
The cells are read left to right and top to bottom. A cell takes a number if a word starts there — across, down, or both at once. Numbers run consecutively, and a cell starting two words carries one number for both.
Clues
Clues are given in two lists, across and down, each in ascending order of number. A clue always points at a whole word; one letter goes in each cell.
The form of the clue must match the form of the answer: a plural is asked for in the plural, a past tense in the past.
Solving
In any order. The usual start is with the clues you are sure of, and everything follows from them: each letter written in narrows the choice for the word that crosses it.
A disagreement at a crossing means one of the two words is wrong — which one, the remaining letters will show.
When it is done
When every working cell is filled and every word answers its clue. An empty cell or a mismatch at a crossing means the solution is not finished.
Worth knowing
What a grid must satisfy is settled by publications rather than by anyone in particular, and they differ: the American tradition checks every letter by a crossing and admits no word shorter than three letters, while other papers allow unchecked letters and a looser symmetry. Whether solving is timed and whether errors are counted belongs to a given competition, not to the puzzle.
Glossary of terms
- A checked letter
- A letter standing on a crossing, confirmed by a second word. An unchecked letter belongs to one word only and nothing confirms it.
- The clue
- The short phrase by which a word is to be recognised. Not a dictionary entry but an indication precise enough, together with the crossings, to leave one answer.
- The crossing
- A cell belonging to two words at once, one across and one down. The letter in it serves both.
- The grid
- The field of a crossword: working cells that take letters, and blocked cells that keep words apart.
- The indicator
- A word in a cryptic clue telling you what to do with the letters: rearrange them, insert them, read them backwards, drop one.