While word squares maintained their quasimagical reputation for hundreds of years, other visual word games became popular during the nineteenth century. The square appears etched on tablets as prevention against mad dogs, a snakebite cure, and a charm to protect cattle from witchcraft. 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. 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. Early Christians might have used the square as a discreet way to signal their presence to one another. Four leftover letters-two a’s and two o’s-stand for alpha and omega. If you reshuffle the letters around a central n, you can make a Greek cross that reads PATERNOSTER (“our father”) in both directions. “Arepo” is a hapax legomenon, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature-the best working theory is that it’s a proper name invented to make the square work.īut the Sator Square has more tricks up its sleeve. It’s unclear why this meme was such a thing. The Sator Square is the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”). The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. An order 10 square is a holy grail for the logologists, that is, the wordplay experts. The number of letters in the square is called its “order.” While 2-squares and 3-squares are easy to create, in English, by the time you reach order 6, you’re very likely to get stuck. 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. 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’t necessarily using deliberate deception and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don’t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through. Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words. Still, the crossword didn’t arise from nowhere.
Nearly overnight, the “Word-Cross Puzzle” went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page. Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper’s FUN 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. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries-I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning.
When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. Paulina Olowska, Crossword Puzzle with Lady in Black Coat, 2014
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