Crossword puzzle
A crossword puzzle is a letter puzzle on an area (usually rectangular) divided into boxes by columns and rows. The words searched for are entered vertically and horizontally in adjacent boxes, in such a way that all the entered or resulting groups of letters make sense (according to the task).
history
The world's first crossword puzzle appeared in the Christmas supplement of the New York World newspaper on December 21, 1913 and contained 31 search terms. It is said to have been invented by the Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne . The basis is said to have been a game by his grandfather called The Magic Squares . Wynne's crossword puzzle had no black fields and was diamond-shaped.
For several years, Wynne varied his word puzzles, adding black fields to delimit the words and arranging the terms in the symmetrical grids that are still used today. The crossword puzzle got its commercial breakthrough from the publishers Dick Simon and Max Schuster . Simon presented the paper with an idea for the puzzle book Cross Word Puzzle Book , the "World" approved the project as there was no copyright . The book was published in the first edition of 3600 copies with a pencil and after a year 400,000 copies were sold. Simon & Schuster is still one of the largest English-language publishers today .
The first crossword puzzles appeared in European newspapers and magazines in the early 1920s. The first crossword puzzle in a German newspaper was printed by Berliner Illustrirte in 1925. In 1985, after four years of preparatory work, Charles Cilard presented the largest crossword puzzle in the world to date. It was 870 m long, 30 cm wide and had 2,610,000 boxes. Solving a crossword puzzle led to the investigation of the so-called crossword murder , one of the most famous criminal cases in the GDR , in 1981, following the world's largest comparison of written samples .
to form
Simple crossword puzzle
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In “ordinary” crossword puzzles, sometimes also referred to as German crossword puzzles , a number in the puzzle refers to the corresponding question, which can be found in a numbered list.
The number in the puzzle is usually in the first letter box of the word you are looking for. Depending on the design of the puzzle, it may then be necessary that the list of questions is divided into "horizontal" and "vertical" words. This type of crossword puzzle does not necessarily require blind boxes; The words in the puzzle can also be separated by hyphens, which clearly reinforce the box frame at the word ends.
With regard to the blind subjects and their position, the typical American crossword puzzle is almost always diagonally symmetrical in both directions. All the words to be entered consist of at least two letters, even if there are some words in English such as "a" and "I" that consist of individual letters. So every letter to be entered belongs to a vertical and a horizontal word.
Alternatively, the number in the puzzle can also be placed in a blind box with an arrow in the direction of the word you are looking for.
Sweden puzzle
In a so-called Sweden puzzle, the question itself is in a blind box with an arrow pointing in the direction of the word you are looking for. Due to the limited space available for the question, Swedish puzzles are often characterized by particularly short questions that correspond to a largely standardized repertoire of searched terms.
A variant of the Sweden puzzle is the Schüttel Sweden puzzle. Instead of the questions themselves, the letters of the term searched for are entered here, but in alphabetical order. The right terms can be found by appropriately combining the horizontally and vertically possible letters and following the elimination process.
"American" crossword puzzle
In the crossword puzzle without blind fields (or without hyphens ), the questions are given in rows and columns (e.g. "Horizontal: 1. X - Y - Z "), whereby the number of blind fields for the respective row or column can be specified or not. In addition to the solution words, the position of the blind fields must also be found out. There is also a variant in which the definitions are not in the correct order.
In the German-speaking world, this type of puzzle is usually referred to as the “American crossword puzzle” (in some puzzle magazines also as “crossword puzzle à la Italy”). However, in both the US and Italy, the simple crossword puzzles described above are standard.
Cross lattice
The cross grid does not contain any numbers in the puzzle field - the guessing person has to combine himself where the searched word is to be entered. A few letters have already been entered to help.
Syllable puzzles
With this type (as a crossword puzzle or cross grid), not individual letters but syllables are used in each field according to the linguistic separation rules.
Number puzzle
In a number puzzle , each field has a number from 1 to 26. The aim is to find out which letter of the alphabet each number represents. Usually a word is given as a start. There are no questions with this type of puzzle: Solution strategies revolve around the frequency of letters and letter combinations as well as typical word images.
A variant of the number puzzle is the Janus puzzle . There are two puzzle fields, whereby the words in the second field must be entered in reverse spelling (from right to left or from bottom to top). However, the numbers for each letter are identical in both puzzle fields.
Do-it-yourself crossword puzzles and cross grids
Here, the solution words, arranged alphabetically and according to the number of letters, are given and must be inserted into a completely empty grid so that a completely completed crossword puzzle results. Some blind fields can already be entered.
Type of questions
In Sweden puzzles in particular, synonyms and knowledge of geography, history or politics are asked for. Example: “Russian River” (with two letters) “Ob”. Words or names with particularly frequent letters in unusual combinations or particularly short words often only appear frequently in puzzles (“puzzle knowledge”), but rarely in everyday life and in the media. To solve the puzzles, lexicons of the typical puzzle knowledge are available as books or on the Internet, which, in contrast to other lexicons and dictionaries, also note the number of letters of the words or are even sorted according to this.
There are also a number of more demanding puzzles, the questions of which require a broader general education and mental flexibility. The most popular puzzle of this kind in Germany is thought around the corner , from the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , also called "Zeit-Rätsel". Also in the Hörzu , in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin , in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Friday edition and FAS), in the Stern and in the Standard there are puzzles of this kind “thought around the corner”.
Classic Italian crossword puzzles have always been based on language games and lateral thinking. This type of definition usually requires more space than would be available in a blind box, which is why the form of the Swedish riddle ( autodefiniti ) with pure knowledge queries was introduced relatively late in Italy.
A special form of the demanding cryptic crossword puzzle based on the cryptic crosswords in the English daily newspapers such as The Times or The Guardian can be found in the weekend edition of the taz . There is also a special feature here in the form: The solution words only cross in a few places, so that a maximum of every second letter can be found by another solution word. The definitions also largely adhere to rules that correspond to those of the English puzzles.
draft
Traditionally, crossword puzzles were designed "by hand", whereby a grid was first created, which is then "filled with the appropriate content". Good crossword puzzles have a high ratio of the total number of fields to the number of blind fields (4: 1 or more). No part of a crossword puzzle must be completely cut off from another part (by touching blind fields), and all horizontal and vertical groups of letters must make sense, including the two-letter groups (if these are not avoided entirely).
In the English-speaking world, great importance is attached to the rotational symmetry of the blind fields, in German this is not the case to this extent. In the Friday puzzles in the FAZ , however, the blind fields are always rotationally symmetrical, and the puzzle in the taz was also designed according to this principle, with some language-related exceptions, whereby the taz puzzle , which has now been discontinued, was actually and secretly designed by hand.
Today's crossword puzzles are more and more often created by software for reasons of cost . Today's software often violates one or (mostly) several of the quality criteria mentioned above. However, some puzzle manufacturers only use the software to automatically generate filler words, the main components can be entered or edited manually with good software versions.
For a few years now there have also been crossword puzzles that can be played online, which have heralded a new generation of puzzles with modern puzzle themes and unusual game functions (e.g. cheating, getting information).
In addition to the Swedish puzzle known as the "normal crossword puzzle", there are other crossword variants (number Swedish puzzle, classic crossword puzzle, shaking Swedish puzzle). Each variant requires its own algorithm for creating the puzzle, which makes the automatic generation of the crossword puzzle even more difficult. There are more than 30 crossword variants in total.
A manufacturer of crossword puzzles, similar word and number puzzles and troubleshooting pictures with 8 employees in Vienna-Donaustadt produces 90 computer-aided puzzle books of around 80 pages each year.
German crossword championships
Since 2010, the German puzzle association Logic Masters Deutschland eV has been organizing the German crossword puzzle championships. The qualification for the respective championship is organized through various puzzle magazines. The four finalists from the previous year and all previous German champions are automatically qualified. On the day of the competition, the four best puzzle solvers will be determined from among the forty participants in the final round in three rounds, who ultimately have to compete directly against each other in front of an audience in the final. The fastest finalist with an error-free solution will be the new German champion.
| year | venue | 1st place | 2nd place | 3rd place | 4th Place |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Hamburg | Rainer Kranz | Inge Kempter | Ulrich Worthmann | Andreas Weber |
| 2011 | Cologne | Birgit Ely | Andreas Weber | Inge Kempter | Barbara Orth |
| 2012 | Berlin | Andreas Weber | Birgit Ely | Carola Lück-Farhat | Matthias Markus |
| 2013 | Munich | Birgit Ely | Rainer Kranz | Andreas Weber | Matthias Markus |
| 2014 | Frankfurt | Andreas Weber | Birgit Ely | Markus Heyer | Dirk New |
| 2015 | did not take place | ||||
| 2016 | did not take place | ||||
| 2017 | Brühl near Cologne | Markus Heyer | Birgit Ely | Inge Kempter | Karin Schattmann |
| 2018 | Bonn | Markus Heyer | Birgit Ely | Volker Conrad | Karin Schattmann |
| 2019 | did not take place |
See also
literature
- Liselotte Benisch: Humboldt Crossword Lexicon. 25th edition. Humboldt, Baden-Baden 2003, ISBN 3-581-66091-1 .
- Heike Pfersdorff (editor): Duden. The little crossword dictionary. 3. Edition. Dudenverlag, Mannheim / Leipzig / Vienna / Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-411-70303-6 .
- Iris Glahn (editor): Duden, The large crossword puzzle lexicon (with more than 230,000 questions and answers). 8th, revised and expanded edition. Dudenverlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-411-05438-1 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Schulte: The first crossword puzzle is published . ( Memento from January 31, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Deutschlandradio Kultur , December 21, 2003 (calendar sheet)
- ↑ George Eliot: Brief History of Crossword Puzzles - contains in on December 21, 1913 New York World reprinted Crossword
- ↑ Lazar Backovic: Invention of the crossword puzzle - It started with FUN, horizontal , one day , accessed on December 21, 2013.
- ↑ Lifestyle: Crossword puzzles made in Vienna orf.at, October 9, 2019, accessed October 16, 2019.
- ↑ Company website Puzzles factory accessed October 16, 2019.