A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of black and white squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases that cross each other, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer words and phrases are placed in the grid from left to right ("across") and from top to bottom ("down"). The shaded squares are used to separate the words or phrases.
A cryptic crossword is a crossword puzzle in which each clue is a word puzzle. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, and South Africa. Compilers of cryptic crosswords are commonly called "setters" in the UK and "constructors" in the US. Particularly in the UK, a distinction may be made between cryptics and "quick" crosswords, and sometimes two sets of clues are given for a single puzzle grid.
The Reverend John Galbraith Graham MBE was a British crossword compiler, best known as Araucaria of The Guardian. He was also, like his father Eric Graham, a Church of England priest.
The National Puzzlers' League (NPL) is a nonprofit organization focused on puzzling, primarily in the realm of word play and word games. Founded in 1883, it is the oldest puzzlers' organization in the world. It originally hosted semiannual conventions in February and September of each year, but conventions are now held annually, in July.
William F. Shortz is an American puzzle creator and editor who is the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in the invented field of "enigmatology". After starting his career at Penny Press and Games magazine, he was hired by The New York Times in 1993. Shortz's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is the country's oldest and largest crossword tournament.
Games World of Puzzles is an American games and puzzle magazine. Originally the merger of two other puzzle magazines spun off from its parent publication Games magazine in the early 1990s, Games World of Puzzles was reunited with Games in October 2014.
Robert Smithies was a British photographer, journalist and crossword compiler. He was born in Middleton, near Rochdale, Lancashire.
The New York Times crossword puzzle is a daily American-style crossword puzzle published in The New York Times, online on the newspaper's website, syndicated to more than 300 other newspapers and journals, and on mobile apps.
Jonathan Crowther is a British crossword compiler who has for over 50 years composed the Azed cryptic crossword in The Observer Sunday newspaper. He was voted "best British crossword setter" in a poll of crossword setters conducted by The Sunday Times in 1991 and in the same year was chosen as "the crossword compilers' crossword compiler" in The Observer Magazine "Experts' Expert" feature.
John Derek Crozier, under the pseudonym "Crosaire", was the compiler of the cryptic crossword in The Irish Times from its inception in 1943 until the year after his death. It was formally named "The Irish Times Crossword", as opposed to the non-cryptic "Simplex crossword" which was published alongside it from 1951. As Crozier was the sole cryptic compiler for 68 years, the crossword itself became known as "the Crosaire" by metonymy. The pseudonym "Crosaire" is a play on his own surname and crosaire, the Irish for "crossroad". After Crozier's death, The Irish Times formally renamed its cryptic crossword in his honour.
Roger Squires was a British crossword compiler/setter, who lived in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He was best known for being the world's most prolific compiler. He compiled under the pseudonym Rufus in The Guardian, Dante in The Financial Times and was the Monday setter for the Daily Telegraph.
David Astle is an Australian TV personality and radio host, and writer of non-fiction, fiction and plays. He also co-hosted the SBS Television (SBS) show Letters and Numbers, as the dictionary expert, in company with Richard Morecroft and Lily Serna, a role to which he returned for Celebrity Letters and Numbers in 2021.
Norman "Trip" Payne is an American professional puzzle maker. He is known by many as a three-time champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT). With his first victory in 1993, at the age of 24, Payne became the youngest champion ever in the tournament's history, a record he held until 2005.
Frank Waring Lewis was an American cryptographer and cryptic crossword compiler. His puzzles were printed in The Nation for over 60 years, for a total of 2,962 puzzles. Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Vonnegut, and Katha Pollitt were listed among the fans of his puzzles.
In 1944, codenames related to the D-Day plans appeared as solutions in crosswords in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, which the British Secret Services initially suspected to be a form of espionage.
Margaret Irvine was a British crossword compiler. She created hundreds of cryptic crosswords between 2006 and 2023 mostly for The Guardian under the pseudonym Nutmeg. She also set puzzles in The Times, The Church Times and, as Mace, in the New Statesman. As of January 2023, Irvine was The Guardian's 7th most prolific current cryptic crossword setter and the 24th most prolific all-time setter.
A Printer's Devilry is a form of cryptic crossword puzzle, first invented by Afrit in 1937. A Printer's Devilry puzzle does not follow the standard Ximenean rules of crossword setting, since the clues do not define the answers. Instead, each clue consists of a sentence from which a string of letters has been removed and, where necessary, the punctuation and word breaks in the clue rearranged to form a new more-or-less grammatical sentence. The challenge to the solver is to find the missing letters, which will spell out a word or phrase that should be entered into the grid.
Sarah Hayes, usually known as Arachne, is a British cryptic crossword setter. She sets puzzles for The Guardian, The Independent, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, and The Times, and advanced cryptics for The Listener crossword, Enigmatic Variations and the Inquisitor. Hayes's clues are often smutty or political and make frequent use of the generic she.
"The Riddle of the Sphinx" is the third episode of the third series of the British dark comedy anthology television programme Inside No. 9. It first aired, on BBC Two, on 28 February 2017. The episode was written by the programme's creators, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, and directed by Guillem Morales. "The Riddle of the Sphinx", which is set in Cambridge, stars Alexandra Roach as Nina, a young woman seeking answers to the Varsity cryptic crossword, Pemberton as Professor Nigel Squires, who pseudonymously sets the crossword using the name Sphinx, and Shearsmith as Dr Jacob Tyler, another Cambridge academic. The story begins with Nina surreptitiously entering Squires's rooms on a stormy night and being discovered; this leads to Squires teaching her how to decipher clues in cryptic crosswords.
