A Brief History of Word Games

Every morning, millions of people open their phones to solve a five-letter puzzle before breakfast. It feels like a very modern habit. But people have been playing with words for thousands of years – scratching puzzles into walls, swapping riddles round the fire, and fighting over the newspaper crossword.

Here’s a short tour of how we got from ancient riddles to today’s daily puzzles – and how almost every game on Wordletz has roots somewhere along the way.

Ancient times: riddles and magic squares

The oldest word games were riddles, passed on by word of mouth long before anyone wrote them down. The most famous comes from Greek mythology. The Sphinx asked travellers: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening? The hero Oedipus answered correctly – a human, who crawls as a baby, walks as an adult and uses a walking stick in old age.

Riddles stayed popular for centuries. In England, the Exeter Book, a manuscript copied over a thousand years ago, contains more than ninety riddles in Old English, many of them still puzzling scholars today.

The Romans had word puzzles too. The most famous is the Sator square, a grid of five Latin words:

S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S

It reads the same forwards, backwards, up and down. The oldest complete example was found in 1936, carved into a column in Pompeii. It was made before an earthquake damaged the building in AD 62 – almost 2,000 years ago. Nobody is completely sure what it means, but it’s clearly a piece of wordplay someone was very proud of.

The ancient world also enjoyed anagrams – rearranging the letters of a word or name to make something new. Poets used them to flatter kings and hide secret messages. Today you can try the same idea in our Anagram Challenge and Word Scramble.

The 1800s: codes and parlour games

In the 19th century, word games moved into Victorian parlours and the pages of popular magazines.

In December 1839, the writer Edgar Allan Poe made a bold claim in a Philadelphia magazine, Alexander’s Weekly Messenger. He said he could crack any simple code readers sent him, where each letter is swapped for another. Over the following months he appears to have solved every one. A few years later, in 1843, he published “The Gold-Bug”, a story about a hidden treasure whose location is written in code – and it explains, step by step, how to break it by counting which symbols appear most often. It helped make cryptograms a popular pastime, and it’s exactly the method you’d use in our Cipher Desk today.

In 1879, Lewis Carroll – the author of Alice in Wonderland – introduced a new puzzle he called “Doublets” in the magazine Vanity Fair. You had to turn one word into another by changing a single letter at a time, making a real word at every step. His first example turned HEAD into TAIL. We know it today as the word ladder, and you can play it in our Word Ladder.

Nobody knows exactly where hangman came from. But in 1894, a folklorist called Alice Gomme collected a children’s game called “Birds, Beasts and Fishes”. One player wrote down the first and last letters of an animal’s name, and the other guessed the letters in between. It didn’t have the famous drawing yet, but the idea was clearly there. Our Hangman is its direct descendant.

1913: the crossword is born

On 21 December 1913, a British-born journalist called Arthur Wynne needed something new for the Christmas puzzle page of the New York World newspaper. Remembering the word squares he’d enjoyed as a child, he drew a diamond-shaped grid where the words crossed each other, and called it a “Word-Cross”. Within a few weeks, a printing mix-up had swapped the words around, and the “Cross-Word” was born.

For ten years it was a fairly quiet newspaper feature. Then, in April 1924, two young publishers called Richard Simon and Max Schuster released their very first book: a collection of crosswords, sold with a pencil attached. It was a huge hit, and sparked a crossword craze across America. Newspapers everywhere rushed to add puzzles of their own.

Britain soon caught the bug too, and gave the world something new: the cryptic crossword, where every clue is a little piece of wordplay. Over a century later, crosswords are still the best-known word puzzle in the world – try one on our Crossword page.

1938: a board game built on maths

During the Great Depression, an out-of-work American architect called Alfred Mosher Butts set out to invent a new game. He wanted it to combine the luck of dice with the skill of crosswords.

To decide how many of each letter to include, he did something remarkable: he went through the front pages of newspapers, including the New York Times, counting how often each letter appeared. Common letters like E got lots of tiles and low scores. Rare ones like Q and Z got just one tile and high scores. He called his game Criss-Crosswords.

In 1948, a games fan called James Brunot bought the rights, made some changes, and gave it a new name: Scrabble. It went on to become one of the best-selling board games of all time. Our Word Tiles uses the classic set of 100 tiles that grew out of the letters Butts counted by hand all those years ago.

The mid-1900s: newspapers and family games

Through the 20th century, word games became part of everyday life. Newspapers added daily word jumbles and cryptograms next to their crosswords. Families gathered round board games where you raced to find words in a grid of letters before the sand timer ran out – the idea behind our Word Grid.

Meanwhile, a different kind of puzzle was growing: code-breaking games, where you guess a hidden word or pattern and get clues about what you got right. These games would turn out to be the ancestors of something very big.

The 2000s and 2010s: puzzles go online

When the internet arrived, puzzles moved with it. Newspapers put their crosswords online, puzzle apps appeared on the first smartphones, and word games became something you could play on the bus or in a queue. New formats appeared too, like the honeycomb puzzle where you make as many words as you can from seven letters, always using the centre one. That’s the format of our Word Hive.

2021: one word a day

In October 2021, a Welsh software engineer called Josh Wardle released a simple game he’d originally made for his partner. You had six tries to guess a five-letter word, with coloured tiles showing which letters were right. There was just one puzzle a day – the same for everyone.

It was called Wordle, and at first only a handful of people played it. Then, in late 2021, a small new feature changed everything: the ability to share your result as a little grid of coloured squares, without giving away the answer. Social media filled up with green and yellow squares, and within weeks millions of people were playing. In January 2022, The New York Times bought the game.

Wordle sparked a wave of new daily puzzles: versions with several boards at once, longer words, and grouping games where you sort sixteen words into four hidden categories – the format of our Connected Words.

Why word games last

Looking back, it’s striking how little has really changed. The Sator square, Carroll’s Doublets and the daily five-letter puzzle all share the same simple ingredients: a small set of letters, a clear rule, and the satisfying click when it all falls into place.

They also share something else: they’re social. Victorian families played them in the parlour, 1920s commuters compared crossword answers on the train, and today we share our coloured squares with friends. Word games have always been a little private challenge that’s even better when you talk about it afterwards.

Play a piece of history

Every game on Wordletz is free, with no sign-up. Why not try one with a long history? Crack a cryptogram in Cipher Desk the way Poe did, climb Lewis Carroll’s Word Ladder, or tackle a Crossword more than a century after the first one appeared.