Question: which bit of the Guardian has published regularly for the best part of 90 years, but has only ever had two editors?
The answer? Nine letters, something, R, something, S, something, something, something, something, D.
Yes, it’s the crossword. First published by the Manchester Guardian in 1929 (prize: two guineas), the cryptic puzzle has been a staple of the newspaper ever since. Ours may be one of the most popular cryptic crosswords in the world, as they are readily available online and not hidden behind a paywall.
And now they are poised for a new era, as we roll them and the entire stable of puzzles into a digital app that will help fund Guardian journalism.
“We have a very big, loyal crossword audience and we wanted to give them another way to support our journalism,” said Savannia Flynn-Naidoo, head of operations for corporate development at Guardian Media Group.
She said that a total of 15,000 puzzles from a 20-year archive would be available on the app, including five different levels of sudokus and other brain teasers. New crosswords will be added once published.
Solvers will be able to join forces remotely to crack a puzzle with the app’s “play together” feature. They can also play against the clock, brag about their mental agility by sharing how quickly they solved a grid, and even cheat by revealing the answers (though not on prize puzzles). And all this for £3.49 a month (or £32.99 a year).
“It’s come together in less than six months,” said David Blishen, the product manager for the app. An external partner, Amuse Labs, helped develop the product, coming up with a prototype within two days. The app has been tested with some of the Guardian’s best-loved setters, who have assisted the development process.
Crosswords may look like ancient things to be fussed at with bitten pencils in hospital waiting areas. But at their best, they are an art form with a whole subculture of their own, an hour of delicious diversion riddled with deliberate attempts to confuse and deflect, like a good whodunnit or a difficult child.
In other papers, crosswords tend to refuse to move with the times (in one, setters are banned from using the names of real people in answers unless they are dead). But the Guardian prefers a more modern approach. Ours are a paean to an ever-evolving language. Individual setters have their own style that takes a while to figure out, but which then becomes the basis of a silent conversation that you have, back and forth, over months.
They are supposedly good for preserving an agile brain into one’s advancing years. And for someone who works with words, I always feel that a completed crossword grid is like limbering up for a day at the coalface. (I once set crosswords and wrote headlines for a living at the same time, and felt there was a delicious overlap between the two disciplines.)
At first glance, a cryptic crossword may be a disconcerting experience. You will recognise the words as being English, but strung together they generally make little sense. This is a whole new lexicon to be learned, where the word “first” might mean “take the first letter of the next word”, or the word “upset” might mean “jumble the letters of the adjacent words around”. Fortunately there are blogs that can help you on your way.
“What I would recommend is doing it in a group and talking to people about it – that is how you learn it and come to enjoy it,” says Hugh Stephenson, one of the aforementioned two crossword editors. (The other was John Perkin, who held the post from 1959-1996.)
At their most artful, cryptic crosswords are an entire story in themselves. Perhaps the most remarkable was the puzzle in which renowned setter John Graham, alias Araucaria, foretold his approaching death. The grid included words like ENDOSCOPY, CHEMOTHERAPY and PALLIATIVE CARE.
“It was a tour de force on his part, to write about his own imminent death, and to do it like that was a really striking thing to have done,” Stephenson said.
Another memorable puzzle was one that was central to the plot of an episode of the BBC series Inside No 9, which was broadcast the same day the puzzle was published. “People were watching the show and thinking ‘that crossword seems familiar’.”
Other creations take the form to new levels of ingenuity: for instance, themed puzzles in which an implausible number of the answers are all of a type – a plant, perhaps, or list of authors. In one remarkable example, many of the answers were areas of the shipping forecast, deployed around the grid in their approximately correct geographical positions.
Now it’s all change. The new app will enable solvers to play offline, to print puzzles if they wish, and to save in perpetuity those fiendish examples that just won’t be finished off. You can also get in touch with suggested improvements by emailing puzzles.feedback@theguardian.com.
Happy puzzling.
You can subscribe to Guardian Puzzles from the Apple Store and Google Play. A one-week trial is available, after which a monthly subscription is £3.49 or an annual subscription costs £32.99. Through subscribing, users will also help support the cost of independent Guardian journalism.