A Brief History of Classic Word Games
Word games are old. Like, written-on-clay-tablets old. The puzzles we play on our phones at breakfast are the latest entries in a 2,500-year tradition of people figuring out clever ways to play with letters. Here's a quick tour of how the formats came to be — and a handful of stories you can casually drop at your next dinner party.
Ancient Beginnings: Acrostics and Anagrams
The earliest word games we have evidence of are acrostics — texts where the first letters of each line spell out a hidden word or phrase. Acrostic poems appear in the Hebrew Bible (Psalm 119 is the most famous example, with each section starting with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet). Greek and Roman writers used acrostics for everything from love poems to political messages.
Anagrams — rearranging letters of one word to make another — were popular in ancient Greece and turned into a courtly hobby in medieval Europe. Renaissance scholars sometimes published academic findings as anagrams to claim priority without revealing the answer until later. Galileo did this in 1610 with his observations of Saturn's rings.
The Victorian Word Game Boom
The 19th century is when word games started looking modern. The puzzle column became a fixture of newspapers and magazines, and several formats that still exist today were invented or formalized in the period.
Word Ladders (1877)
Lewis Carroll invented word ladders, which he called "Doublets," for his friend's two daughters in 1877. The puzzle: change one word into another by changing one letter at a time, each step a valid English word. He published a Doublets column in Vanity Fair magazine that ran for years.
His most famous example: HEAD → TAIL, in five steps (HEAD → HEAL → TEAL → TELL → TALL → TAIL). The format has been a puzzle staple ever since, including the modern app version in Word Walk. (For more on Carroll's original puzzles, see our piece on Lewis Carroll's famous word ladders.)
Word Squares
The "word square" — a grid where the same words read across and down — was a Victorian obsession. Five-by-five squares were considered solvable; six-by-six was a stretch; nine-by-nine was a kind of puzzle holy grail. Some proposed nine-by-nine squares are still under debate as to whether they use all-valid words.
The Crossword Era (1913 to Today)
The crossword as we know it was invented by Arthur Wynne in 1913 for the New York World newspaper. His original design was diamond-shaped, with no internal black squares, and was billed as a "Word-Cross." A typesetter accidentally swapped it to "Cross-Word" a few weeks later, and the new name stuck.
Crosswords became a national craze in the 1920s when Simon & Schuster published The Cross Word Puzzle Book. The book was such a hit that it essentially created the modern Simon & Schuster publishing house. By 1925, crosswords were so popular that The New York Times ran an editorial calling them a "primitive form of mental exercise" and refused to publish them. The Times finally caved in 1942 — they figured Americans needed distraction during World War II — and have published one daily ever since.
The British cryptic crossword evolved separately in the 1920s and '30s, prioritizing wordplay and indirect cluing over the more straightforward American style. Both styles are still flourishing.
Scrabble (1938)
Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect during the Depression, designed Scrabble in 1938. He calculated letter frequencies by counting letters in newspaper articles, which is why Scrabble's tile distribution still mirrors English usage almost a century later.
The game flopped at first. Butts called it "Lexiko," then "Criss-Cross Words," and made tiles by hand. In 1948, James Brunot bought the rights, renamed it "Scrabble," and refined the rules. Sales stayed modest until 1952, when the president of Macy's reportedly played the game on vacation, returned to find his store didn't carry it, and ordered a stocking. Sales exploded. By 1953, factories couldn't keep up.
The Television and Magazine Era
Mid-century word games expanded into broadcast and packaging. Wheel of Fortune (1975) made hangman into prime-time entertainment. Penny Press, Dell, and Games World magazines built entire businesses on monthly puzzle digests. Crossword construction became a viable freelance career.
Word search puzzles, invented in 1968 by Norman Gibat, spread through schoolbooks and supermarket checkout displays. They're often dismissed by serious puzzlers as too simple, but they remain massively popular as a low-effort relaxation activity.
The Digital Wave
Computers changed word games more by enabling new forms of play than by replacing old ones.
Boggle (1972)
Allan Turoff's Boggle introduced the timed word-search format. Players had three minutes to find words in a shaken 4x4 letter grid. The kinetic, social pace was different from the meditative pace of crosswords.
Words With Friends (2009)
Zynga's mobile reimagining of Scrabble made async multiplayer normal. Suddenly grandparents were trading words with grandkids in different time zones.
Wordle (2021)
Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn-based engineer, built Wordle as a private game for his partner during the pandemic. He released it publicly in October 2021. By December, it had millions of daily players. The New York Times bought it in January 2022 for "low seven figures."
Wordle's significance isn't just the format — six guesses to find a five-letter word is older than the game itself, derived from the 1955 game Jotto. The new ingredient was the once-a-day, share-your-result-emoji social loop. That structure has been copied by hundreds of subsequent puzzles. (Our roundup of daily word games like Wordle covers the descendants.)
Connections (2023)
NYT's Connections took the daily-puzzle format and added the categorization mechanic. It's now arguably more popular than Wordle in casual play because the puzzle changes shape every day rather than running through a fixed format.
What's Next
If history is a guide, the next wave of word games will likely combine the daily-share format of Wordle with collaborative or asynchronous mechanics. Some are already emerging — multiplayer word ladders, group-Wordle variants, daily Connections-style team puzzles. The form keeps reinventing itself.
The constant: people genuinely love playing with letters. From Hebrew acrostics to Carroll's Doublets to Wordle, the underlying motion — finding a hidden order in a string of letters — keeps drawing us back.
Quick Takeaways
- Acrostics and anagrams date back at least 2,500 years.
- Lewis Carroll invented word ladders ("Doublets") in 1877.
- The first crossword was published in 1913; the NYT didn't publish them until 1942.
- Scrabble (1938) flopped for over a decade before becoming a hit in 1952.
- Wordle (2021) wasn't a new format — it was an old format with a viral daily-share loop.