Image shows first-ever crossword puzzle—published 112 years ago

Love a good crossword puzzle? Word-game enthusiasts may be glad to know that the first-ever crossword puzzle was published around this time over a century ago.

According to Guinness World Records, the first crossword puzzle appeared in the Sunday “Fun” section of the New York World, a newspaper in the United States, on December 21 in 1913.

Created by journalist Arthur Wynne, the first crossword was “based on a diamond shaped grid, had no blacked-out squares and featured simple, noncryptic clues,” Guinness World Records notes.

An image of the first crossword puzzle, which was published in a newspaper in the United States on December 21, 1913.

Wynne’s crossword instructs puzzle solvers to “fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”

The puzzle page then features several lines of word clues, listed with two numbers that indicate the start and end of the box containing the word.

For example, the first word clue listed says, “2-3 What bargain hunters enjoy,” while the next line reads, “4-5 A written acknowledgment.”

Hailing from Liverpool, England, in the United Kingdom, Wynne emigrated to the U.S. and abandoned onion farming for journalism, becoming the editor of the New York World, The Guardian reported back in 2013.

According to Britannica, the first basic form of crosswords, described to be “of an elementary kind apparently derived from the word square, a group of words arranged so the letters read alike vertically and horizontally,” appeared in England in the U.K. during the 19th century.

However, in the U.S., the crossword puzzle turned into a serious adult pastime, and it wasn’t until two young guys known as Simon and Schuster, whose publishing house would later go on to release books by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, put these puzzles into a book that they really took off, according to The Guardian.

By 1923, crosswords were being published in most of the leading newspapers in the U.S. and the crossword craze later spread to England. Soon, nearly all daily newspapers in the U.S. and Great Britain had some form of a crossword feature.

While the majority of crossword puzzles have the form of symmetrical patterns of shaded or blacked-out squares within a rectangle, there are many variations, from an asymmetrical scattering of squares to a plain diagram with no squares canceled and the ends of words marked by a thick line.