The puzzle is created by various freelance constructors and has been edited by Will Shortz since The puzzle becomes increasingly difficult throughout the week, with the easiest puzzle on Monday and the most difficult puzzle on Saturday.

The New York Times crossword puzzle - Wikipedia

While crosswords became popular in the early s, it was not until that The New York Times which initially regarded crosswords as frivolous, calling them "a primitive form of mental exercise" began running a crossword in its Sunday edition. The motivating impulse for the Times to finally run the puzzle which took over 20 years even though its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger , was a longtime crossword fan appears to have been the bombing of Pearl Harbor ; in a memo dated December 18, , an editor conceded that the puzzle deserved space in the paper, considering what was happening elsewhere in the world and that readers might need something to occupy themselves during blackouts.

In , the crossword became a daily feature. That first daily puzzle was published without an author line, and to this day the identity of the author of the first weekday Times crossword remains unknown.

Daily Crossword

There have been four editors of the puzzle: Margaret Farrar from the puzzle's inception until ; Will Weng , former head of the Times's metropolitan copy desk, until ; Eugene T. Maleska until his death in ; and the current editor, Will Shortz. In addition to editing the Times crosswords, Shortz founded and runs the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament as well as the World Puzzle Championship where he remains captain of the US team , has published numerous books of crosswords, sudoku , and other puzzles, authors occasional variety puzzles a.

The popularity of the puzzle grew over the years, until it came to be considered the most prestigious of the widely circulated crosswords in America; its popularity is attested to by the numerous celebrities and public figures who've publicly proclaimed their liking for the puzzle, including opera singer Beverly Sills , [10] author Norman Mailer , [14] baseball pitcher Mike Mussina , [15] former President Bill Clinton , [16] conductor Leonard Bernstein , [10] TV host Jon Stewart [15] and music duo the Indigo Girls.

The Times puzzles have been collected in hundreds of books over the years from various publishers, most notably Random House and St.

Martin's Press , the current publisher of the series. The game includes over 1, Times crosswords from all days of the week. Various other forms of merchandise featuring the puzzle have been created over the years, including dedicated electronic crossword handhelds that just contain Times crosswords, as well as a variety of Times crossword-themed memorabilia including cookie jars, baseballs, cufflinks, plates, coasters, mousepads, and the like.

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Will Shortz does not write the Times crossword himself; the puzzles are submitted to him by a wide variety of contributors. A full specification sheet listing the paper's requirements for crossword puzzle submission can be found online see "External Links" or by writing to the paper.

Date, for example Crossword Clue

Aside from increasing in difficulty throughout the week, the Monday-Thursday puzzles and the Sunday puzzle always have a theme, some sort of connection between at least three long usually Across answers, such as a similar type of pun, letter substitution, or alteration in each entry. Another theme type is that of a humorous quotation broken up into symmetrical portions and spread throughout the grid.

For example, the February 11, , puzzle by Ethan Friedman featured a theme quotation: Notable dates such as holidays or anniversaries of famous events are often commemorated with an appropriately themed puzzle, although only two are currently commemorated on a routine annual basis: Christmas and April Fool's Day.

The maximum word count for a themed weekday puzzle is normally 78 words, while the maximum for an unthemed Friday or Saturday puzzle is 72; Sunday puzzles must contain words or fewer. The puzzle follows a number of conventions, both for tradition's sake and to aid solvers in completing the crossword:. In addition to the primary crossword, the Times publishes a second Sunday puzzle each week, of varying types, something that the first crossword editor, Margaret Farrar, saw as a part of the paper's Sunday puzzle offering from the start; she wrote in a memo when the Times was considering whether or not to start running crosswords that "The smaller puzzle, which would occupy the lower part of the page, could provide variety each Sunday.

Production Notes from IMDbPro

It could be topical, humorous, have rhymed definitions or story definitions or quiz definitions. The combination of these two would offer meat and dessert, and catch the fancy of all types of puzzlers. Kingsley, who is credited with inventing the puzzle type, and continued to write the Times acrostic until December 28, Given the scientific-looking layout of the puzzles, it makes sense that early computer programmers tried to get their machines to do the work of writing crosswords. In the late s, though, Boston computer programmer Eric Albert had an idea, he wrote: A computer could generate high-quality crossword puzzles if each entry in its word database were ranked on, say, a scale from one to By ranking the words, the junk would be left out and just the good stuff would go in.

You still end up with esoteric words, but at least the puzzle makes sense, unlike the all-computer-created versions. And crossword aficionadoes understand that crosswords don't work without fill.

• Why Crossword Puzzles Are Still Mostly Written By Humans.
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Famous cruciverbalists like Frank Longo are legendary for having huge databases of potential crossword additions. When Gaffney wrote his piece in , he was one of the few writers who still wrote crosswords without the help of a database.

But now, Gaffney is part of a movement of indie crossword puzzle makers who describe themselves as being like indie brewers. But, Gaffney told the reporter, The New York Times and other legacy puzzles will likely be part of the industry for some time to come. Subscribe or Give a Gift. Brazil Dissolves Its Culture Ministry. The Plot to Kill George Washington. Science Age of Humans. Photos from the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival.