Why English-language crosswords bear the names of their constructors
Like many American inventions, the crossword became, in the twentieth century, a global phenomenon. Browse at newspaper kiosks and bookshops around the world, and you’ll see Greek, Persian, Japanese, and Tamil surrounding those familiar-looking grids. However, the crossword is not ubiquitous—some languages do not take kindly to being broken into pieces and plotted in interlocking squares.
Where it does appear, the culture of crosswords adapts to its environment. Some differences are visual: In South American puzzles, the clues live in the grid, printed in tiny type with arrows indicating the direction of the answers; the squares of the smaller Japanese grids each take one syllable rather than one letter.
More important—and something for its speakers to celebrate—is the greater scope afforded to constructors who work in English. English may be called a Germanic language, but it’s more like a mélange, salmagundi, or omnium-gatherum: For any English word with a German origin, there may well be a perfectly usable alternative brought to Britain by the Norman French or something with a Latin flavor.
And so, as the Oxford Dictionaries website carefully words it, “it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.” There are many different ways of denoting the same objects and actions, but all are valid parts of the English lexicon. If you want to hint at some word or other, your options may well be multiple—even the definitions under that word in a dictionary will offer alternatives of varying degrees of delight. No wonder the English language is well suited to the crossword.
When the crossword was on the rise, London Times editor George Geoffrey Dawson wondered if there were any better reason for the existence of words such as CADI, EFFENDI, MUEZZIN, and VIZIER than “to get crossword composers out of trouble.” It’s as if Dawson had tried to construct a puzzle himself, got frustrated when he found he’d constructed himself into a corner that needed a very un-English-looking word, and then realized that some exotic term imported from Turkey might just do the job.
It’s certainly true that English has always been happy to absorb words from places with which Britain has traded or that have been part of its empire, thus further expanding the vocabulary available to the creators of word games.
The existence of multiple words for any one given thing makes English not especially friendly toward nonnative speakers trying to learn the language, but on the upside, it’s perfect for games that involve words, terms, designations, expressions, and utterances.
The obverse is also true: The existence of so many words with multiple meanings is a boon to constructors. Want to write a misleading clue where a perfectly ordinary word turns out to signify something quite unexpected? English is your language.
All those choices mean that the crossword constructor is no mere paraphraser. Each time she chooses one interpretation of a word over another, or a circuitous route in preference to a direct one, she is expressing her personality. And so it is little surprise that solvers can have favorite constructors and develop over years of grid filling a sense that they know their favorites—that they understand how those challenging minds work. Can you say the same of the creators of other puzzles like word searches or sudokus?
In non-English-language puzzles, named constructors are rare and the crossword sits on the puzzle page, impersonal and apparently aloof. They have their own pleasures—the cheery, inclusive way that È, É, and Ê are all rendered E in the French puzzle, for example—but the clueing cannot compete. And why put your name to a list of synonyms? English-language constructors, having all those extra words to play with, are, in contrast, regarded more like authors. And rightly so.
(And so any puzzle, in whatever language, should be approached by the nonnative speaker with extreme caution. After all, it’s not like you can just translate a clue from one language to another. Can you . . . ?)