Good morning, everyone. I’m Tran Dinh Truong. Today, I’m going to talk about the history of a game.

Its
name has nine letters and starts with the letter C. Can you guess its name? That’s crossword. Crossword
has an interesting history that you may not know. In my presentation, I’ll focus on its inventor, its
original idea and its name. I’ll answer questions at the end of the speech so please wait until then.

Let’s begin with the inventor. The author of the game is Arthur Wynne. He was born in England but then
moved to America to work. He worked as a journalist in the New York World Newspaper. One day, he
was asked to create a new game for a section in the newspaper on Sundays. That’s when a new game
was about to be created.

Arthur thought of an old game in Pompeii, Magic Square, which he played when being at school. In
Magic Square, the players have to put given words into a so that the words can be read across and
down. Authur used that idea and created a new game. He didn’t give players the words. He only gave
them the clues so that they had to make out the words by themselves. He introduced the first crossword
in 1913.

About the name. At first, the name of the game was word-cross. Then, they changed the order of 2
words and it became cross-word and it still had a hyphen in the middle. But there was a typing mistake.
They forgot the hyphen so the crossword became like nowadays without the hyphen.

To summarise, crossword was created by Authur Wynne in 1913, based on Magic Square game, and its
name has small changes. Now you have known about the history of a popular game. If you need more
clarification, please raise your hands and I’ll answer your questions.