| Arthur Wynne | |
| Birth Date: | 22 June 1871 |
| Birth Place: | Liverpool, England, United Kingdom |
| Death Place: | Clearwater, Florida, United States |
| Citizenship: | United Kingdom (1871–1945) United States (1920s–1945) |
| Known For: | Inventor of crossword puzzle |
Arthur Wynne (June 22, 1871January 14, 1945) was the British-born inventor of the modern crossword puzzle.
Arthur Wynne was born on June 22, 1871, in Liverpool, England, and lived on Edge Lane for a time. His father was the editor of the local newspaper, the Liverpool Mercury.[1] He emigrated to the United States on June 6, 1891, at the age of 19,[2] settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[3]
While in Pittsburgh, Wynne worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper[3] and played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.[4] He later moved to New York City and worked on the New York World newspaper. He is best known for the invention of the crossword puzzle in 1913, when he was a resident of Cedar Grove, New Jersey.[5]
Wynne created the page of puzzles for the "Fun" section of the Sunday edition of the New York World. For the December 21, 1913, edition, he introduced a puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center, with the letters F-U-N already being filled in. He called it a "Word-Cross Puzzle."[6]
Although Wynne's invention was based on earlier puzzle forms, such as the word diamond, he introduced a number of innovations (e.g. the use of horizontal and vertical lines to create boxes for solvers to enter letters). He subsequently pioneered the use of black squares in a symmetrical arrangement to separate words in rows and columns. With the exception of the numbering scheme, the form of Wynne's "Word-Cross" puzzles is that used for modern crosswords.
A few weeks after the first "Word-Cross" appeared, the name of the puzzle was changed to "Cross-Word" as a result of a typesetting error. Wynne's puzzles have been known as "crosswords" ever since.
Arthur Wynne became a naturalized US citizen in the 1920s.[7] He died in Clearwater, Florida, on January 14, 1945.
On December 20, 2013, he was honored with an interactive Google Doodle commemorating the "100th anniversary of the first crossword puzzle"[8] [9] [10] with a puzzle by Merl Reagle. Numerous other constructors also created tribute puzzles to Wynne to commemorate the anniversary.