{"id":143738,"date":"2020-03-23T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2020-03-23T15:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=143738"},"modified":"2020-03-23T10:00:06","modified_gmt":"2020-03-23T14:00:06","slug":"a-brief-history-of-word-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/23\/a-brief-history-of-word-games\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Word Games"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Paulina Olowska, Crossword Puzzle with Lady in Black Coat<\/em>, 2014<\/p><\/div>\n

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject<\/a>, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren\u2019t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries\u2014I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum <\/em>each morning\u00ad\u00ad. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation. Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World<\/em> needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper\u2019s FUN<\/small> supplement, so he took advantage of new technology that could print blank grids cheaply and created a diamond-shaped set of boxes, with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of FUN<\/small>. Nearly overnight, the \u201cWord-Cross Puzzle\u201d went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page.<\/p>\n

Still, the crossword didn\u2019t arise from nowhere. Ever since we\u2019ve had language, we\u2019ve played games with words. Crosswords are the Punnett square of two long-standing strands of word puzzles: word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren\u2019t necessarily using deliberate deception; and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don\u2019t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through.<\/p>\n

WORD SQUARES<\/strong><\/p>\n

The direct precursor of the crossword grid is the word square, a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its \u201corder.\u201d While 2-squares and 3-squares are easy to create, in English, by the time you reach order 6, you\u2019re very likely to get stuck. An order 10 square is a holy grail for the logologists, that is, the wordplay experts.<\/p>\n

The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city\u2019s name: the inverse of ROMA<\/small>, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR<\/small>. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn\u2019t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS<\/small> (\u201cthe farmer Arepo works a plow\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sator square, Opp\u00e8de, France<\/p><\/div>\n

The Sator Square is the \u201cKilroy Was Here\u201d of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). It\u2019s unclear why this meme was such a thing. \u201cArepo\u201d is a hapax legomenon<\/em>, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature\u2014the best working theory is that it\u2019s a proper name invented to make the square work.<\/p>\n

But the Sator Square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle the letters around a central n,<\/em> you can make a Greek cross that reads PATERNOSTER<\/small> (\u201cour father\u201d) in both directions. Four leftover letters\u2014two a<\/em>\u2019s and two o<\/em>\u2019s\u2014stand for alpha and omega. Early Christians might have used the square as a discreet way to signal their presence to one another.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Through the Middle Ages and beyond, the Sator Square persisted as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil, apparently, gets confused by palindromes, not knowing which way to read, so a five-by-five two-dimensional palindrome is an extra-powerful snare. The square appears etched on tablets as prevention against mad dogs, a snakebite cure, and a charm to protect cattle from witchcraft.<\/p>\n

While word squares maintained their quasimagical reputation for hundreds of years, other visual word games became popular during the nineteenth century. The Victorian era saw a boomlet of visual word games, such as double acrostics, that paved the way pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria, an ur-cruciverbalist, constructed the \u201cWindsor Enigma\u201d to teach her subjects how to bring coals to Newcastle:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Queen Victoria, \u201cWindsor Enigma,\u201d in Victorian Enigmas, or Windsor Fireside Researches<\/em> by Charlotte Eliza Capel (1861)<\/p><\/div>\n

Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, invented a game called doublets, in which you transform one word into another of equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using as few moves as possible; all the linking steps also have to be legitimate words. As in a crossword, the process of moving stepwise from letter to letter forces you to think about all the possible word combinations. And each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini-alchemy: Drive PIG<\/small> into STY<\/small>. Raise FOUR<\/small> to FIVE<\/small>. Make WHEAT<\/small> into BREAD<\/small>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Charles Dodgson, \u201cDoublets: A Word Puzzle\u201d (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880)<\/p><\/div>\n

But the particular magic of the crossword came when riddles entered the grid.<\/p>\n

RIDDLES<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crossword clues trace their origins to riddles, ancient and ubiquitous little games that run the gamut from divine spells to dick jokes. The Exeter Book, an eleventh-century Old English manuscript, has about a hundred riddles of all types: a sweet ditty about a bookworm, barely veiled double entendres about swords in scabbards and bread rising in ovens, and solemn liturgical hymns. There are \u201cabout\u201d a hundred because these riddles are still maddening their readers. In the ten centuries since their composition, scholars haven\u2019t conclusively solved every one, which also means that some of the things that get treated as separate puzzles might actually be one giant long riddle, or what we think is a long clue might have two or three answers. Riddle snark is a cottage industry among medievalists, who love to argue about solutions to the riddles, mostly by means of long, ostentatiously thorough academic articles. There ain\u2019t no scholarly rap battle like a multigenerational face-off over whether Riddle 86\u2019s answer is an \u201corgan\u201d or a \u201cone-eyed seller of garlic.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are four basic ways that riddle logic operates: true riddles, wordplay, neck riddles, and anti-riddles. The enigma, a metaphorical statement that\u2019s designed to feel <\/em>like it has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different. Think of koans, like What is the sound of one hand clapping?, or meditative statements like 1 Corinthans 13:12: \u201cFor now we see through a glass, darkly.\u201d These are logic knots that want to stay knotted, or (k)not solved.<\/p>\n

Riddles, on the other hand, do <\/em>want to be solved.<\/p>\n

TRUE RIDDLES<\/strong><\/p>\n

A true riddle transforms thing A into solution B (A\u2014>B). Take Little Nancy Etticoat:<\/p>\n

Little Nancy Etticoat
\nIn a white petticoat
\nAnd a red nose;
\nThe longer she stands,
\nThe shorter she grows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The answer? A candle: the \u201cwhite petticoat\u201d is the wax, the \u201cred nose\u201d the flame, and of course the longer you leave a candle standing, the shorter it\u2019s going to become. True riddles rely on a logical connection that\u2019s not obvious on the surface, so you have to twist your brain to get it. They\u2019ve been around for millennia, and the best have been repeated for that long. Take, for example, \u201cWhat has six legs but walks on four feet?\u201d (Answer: a horse and rider.) Or the Sphinx\u2019s riddle: \u201cWhat walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?\u201d (A human: crawling as a baby, standing upright as an adult, and using a cane when old.)<\/p>\n

When riddles become baked into culture, they can turn into in-jokes. Consider an egg. Egg\u2019s a great solution for lots of images: a house without doors or windows; a house that cannot be reentered; begets parent; and more. In fact, one egg riddle has become synonymous with the whole genre of riddling itself: Humpty-Dumpty\u2014or, if you prefer, his counterparts: Boule Boule (France), or Tille Lille (Sweden), or Wirgele-Wargele (Germany), or Hu\u0308mpelken-Pu\u0308mpelken (also Germany)\u2014was originally printed as a riddle with the answer \u201cegg.\u201d The true riddle can thus become a meta-riddle.<\/p>\n

WORDPLAY RIDDLES<\/strong><\/p>\n

A wordplay riddle does the same thing as a true riddle, but adds an extra layer of trickiness (A\u2014>\u2200\u2014>B). Wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics to take the anticipated answer to the next step. A rebus, for example, uses letters as part of the clue. One simple French rebus riddle uses just two letters\u2014G<\/em> and a<\/em>\u2014to be read as J\u2019ai grand appetit (<\/em>\u201cG<\/em> grand,\u00a0a<\/em> petit\u201d). A syllable riddle acts as a game of charades, connecting seemingly disparate parts, as in this eighteenth-century example:<\/p>\n

My first is expressive of no disrespect,
\nBut I never call you by it when you are by;
\nIf my second you still are resolved to reject,
\nAs dead as my whole, I shall presently lie.<\/p>\n

The answer: \u201cherring\u201d (her<\/em> + ring<\/em>).<\/p>\n

NECK RIDDLES<\/strong><\/p>\n

A neck riddle gives a solution that would be impossible for the solver to arrive at without context (?\u2014>B). The term \u201cneck riddle\u201d comes from stories in which the hero uses an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge and save himself from being hanged: a neck riddle saves your neck. One typical folktale example:<\/p>\n

As I walked out and in again
\nFrom the dead the living came.
\nSix there is and seven there\u2019ll be,
\nSo tell me this riddle or set me free.<\/p>\n

The answer is a horse\u2019s skull that contains a bird hatching eggs; six have hatched but one is still to come. A neck riddle has an answer that\u2019s so specific it\u2019s deeply unsatisfying, because that\u2019s precisely the point: after all, it\u2019s not actually a solvable, it\u2019s got to be such a stumper that you get off scot-free. Often that\u2019s achieved through overprecision, but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick. In The Hobbit<\/em>, our hero Bilbo Baggins bests Gollum in a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable \u201cwhat\u2019s in my pocket?\u201d<\/p>\n

ANTI-RIDDLES<\/strong><\/p>\n

An anti-riddle is one that tricks the reader by looking like a riddle but not actually being one at all (A\u2014>A). \u201cWhy did the chicken cross the road?\u201d smells like a riddle, but the answer, \u201cTo get to the other side,\u201d is just the literal answer. \u201cWhat\u2019s black and white and red\/read all over?\u201d might not be \u201ca newspaper\u201d but rather \u201ca zebra with blood on it,\u201d defying the anticipated pun with the unexpectedly ultraliteral.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>*<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving a crossword. You\u2019d have to separate the puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the issue: how to figure out what a clue is saying (or, rather, what it\u2019s precisely not<\/em> saying); and how to fill the letters in the grid in the way that makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual-spatial part of the brain with the logic-pun part of the brain. This is part of the reason why even the best crossword-solving AI in the world isn\u2019t yet better than the best human: the AI can fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that, through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn\u2019t know we had. And yet we\u2019ve always been primed to solve them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adrienne Raphel is the author of<\/em> Thinking inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can\u2019t Live without Them.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since we\u2019ve had language, we\u2019ve played games with words.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Brief History of Word Games by Adrienne Raphel<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 23, 2020 \u2013 Ever since we\u2019ve had language, we\u2019ve played games with words.\u00a0\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/23\/a-brief-history-of-word-games\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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