Join the Westport Library diehard puzzle fans for a showing of WordPlay, a journey into the world of Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor at the New York Times. The library will screen this much acclaimed documentary on January 31st at 7:00 on the large screen in the McManus Room. The viewing offers a warm up to our annual Crossword Puzzle Contest on Saturday, February 1st.
So where did the craze for crossword puzzles begin? Word squares go back to ancient times. Archeologists have found a word square in the ancient ruins of Pompeii. But the crossword as a newspaper feature dates to Dec. 21,1913 when the Sunday New York World printed a puzzle called a "word-cross creating an immediate success and a new weekly obsession was born. The name evolved into the more melodic sounding "cross-word," and the hyphen was eventually dropped. Given the popularity of the New York Times puzzle, it is hard to believe that this paper didn’t get on the bandwagon until 1942. Today, it is estimated that over 50 million people do crosswords each week. Do you?