How Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle Work?

in particular, is an American institution. Strangely enough, The New York Times was the last major metropolitan daily newspaper in the country to start a crossword. When the crossword puzzle craze gripped the United States in nineteen four, the paper publicly condemned the fad, publishing a scornful editorial in which it called crosswords the latest of the problems presented for solution by psychologists interested in the mental peculiarities of mobs

and crowds, which was a pretty sick burn. Back in Simon and Schoose published the first crossword puzzle book that year, and most American newspapers started a cross word between nineteen twenty four and nineteen twenty six. The holdout of the Times might have had something to do with the fact that it had never done comics or entertainment features of

any sort. All that stuff was considered frivolous by its editors, but the crossword had staying power, and at the beginning of World War Two, the then editor of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger, decided it was time for the paper to start its own puzzle. We spoke with the current New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. He said, the probably apocryphal story is that Saulsberger was tired of buying the

competing New York Herald Tribune to get their crossword. It was the start of World War Two and it was thought that people needed to take their minds off the grim war news. So the Times had the good sense to ask Margaret Ferrar to be the crossword editor. She had co edited all the Simon and Schuster crossword books,

going back to the very first one in four. Margaret immediately raised the quality of the crossword above anyone else's, the intellectual caliber of the puzzle, the cultural references, and just the quality of the puzzle, making more interesting vocabulary and fresher more on target definitions. Farrar was the Times Crossword editor for twenty seven years from nineteen forty two to nineteen sixty nine, and the puzzle evolved a bit

over that time. At the start, she was given the directive that the puzzle should reflect the information that the reader was picking up in the pages of the newspaper. So if you go back to those early puzzles, you'll see a lot of war references. But Farrar thought the crossword should distract people from the harsher aspects of life, which is why over time she began to include more entertainment, literature,

and non news subjects. Farrar was succeeded in nineteen sixty nine by Will Wang, who was the head of the Metropolitan desk at The Times before he took the job of crossboard editor. Wang was an old fashioned newsman, but he had an abiding love crosswords. He had been creating puzzles for The Times for years before he became editor. Shorts said his greatest innovation for The Times Crossword was humor. He was a genuinely funny man, and his sense of

humor came through in the puzzles. When retired in nineteen seventy seven and was succeeded by Eugene T. Moleska. I'd say the word play in the crossword themes became more varied and sophisticated. Under Moleska, it became more a word game than in previous years. But Moleska was a staid guy. He had been a school superintendent in the Bronx. He loved opera and classical music, and his puzzles had a

more serious tone than will Wang's. Schwartz became Crossword editor in ninetee when Moleska died, and one of his goals has been to modernize the puzzle to include more current cultural references, more update language, and more playful themes. And the audience has broadened under Shorts. He said, it used to be you'd think of cross words as being mainly for older people, and I think that was true before

I became editor. I can tell how the audience has broadened just of the people who contribute to the puzzle. In the whole history of the puzzle, before Shorts became editor, only six teenagers had gotten puzzles published in the Times. In Shorts's twenty five years as puzzle editor, he's published thirty seventeenagers and lots of twenty and thirty some things. The average age of contributors has come down by about fifteen years from the early fifties to the late thirties.

The youngest person Shorts has published was thirteen, and the oldest person was a hundred and one. Shorts said, it's an extremely diverse group of people who make the Times Crossword. It reflects the Times readership itself. Shorts, you might have gathered, does not construct the puzzles himself, though he does create

variety puzzles, unique and new variations in crosswords. Shorts and his two assistants get between seventy five and one hundred puzzle submissions every week, which they look through call to select the best ones, then edit for publication. These days, most crossword puzzles have themes, which means the long answers tied together in some interesting way. When creating a puzzle, you put your theme answers in a grid, first, plotting black squares around those, which divides the grid into sections,

which are then filled with words. When you've polished the puzzle to the best of your ability, you write the clues. The Time's Crossword gets more difficult as the week progresses. Monday is the simplest, and the puzzle turns up the heat a little each day until the Saturday puzzle, which can seem nion impossible. The Sunday crossword is bigger, but as far as difficulty goes, it's like a hard Wednesday

or easy Thursday. Sunday is the biggest circulation day of the week, so Shorts wants to make sure the crossword is accessible to the broadest possible audience. When Shorts started his job in virtually all the puzzles were created by hand on graph paper, and all of them were solved with a pencil or pen if that's the way you roll hot shot. These days, however, most crossword constructors use computer software to build their puzzles, and lots of people

solve the puzzles online or otherwise electronically. Short said, you have to subscribe to solve the online version of the Times Crossword. Even if you subscribe to the printed or online versions of the paper, you have to pay extra for it. These days, or hundred and thirty thousand people subscribed to just the crossword. It's become a significant source of income for the company, and it can be a

significant source of income for the writers. A successful cross word contributor can make between five hundred and two thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars per puzzle, depending on the day of week and how many previous puzzles they've had accepted for publication. Today's episode was written by Jesslin Shields and produced by Tyler Clay. For more on this and lots of other not so puzzling topics, becasit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I heart Radio.

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