The cross word puzzle book

by Unknown

Of ancient glory, too, is the palindrome, which is properly not a puzzle at all, but an ingenuity. A palindrome reads the same backward and forward, as in the familiar “Madam, I’m Adam,” and “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” Perhaps the most charming of antique palindromes is the Roman legal maxim, “Si nummi immunis,”—“if you pay you go free.”

But perhaps the most fascinating of all word puzzles are [[20]]the types in which words are to be guessed from definitions. There is the well-known acrostic, where with definitions as clues you arrive at a set of words of which the initial letters, or finals or second letters or third, as may have been determined, will spell another or other words. During the struggle for Italian freedom an acrostic was seen in the shibboleth, Vittorio Emmanuele Re D’Italia, giving the name of the composer, Verdi. Most august of all is the fish symbol for Christ, which was held in much mystic veneration in the early Christian centuries. The Greek word for fish, Ichthys (Ιχθυς) was seen to be composed of the first letters of the sacred phrase, Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter (Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Υἱὸς Σῷτήρ), meaning “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

It is the feature of determining words from definitions that has made “word forms” the most popular genus of puzzle. A word form is a set of words arranged one under the other so that their letters may be read across and down to give sensible readings, sometimes the same readings across and down and sometimes different readings. They may be of many geometric configurations, as square, pyramid, octagon, etc. Their origin is lost in the mists of time.

Word forms, especially squares, have a considerable following of very skillful adepts, most of them members of the National Puzzlers’ League, who construct and solve them with the same sort of devotion that a chess player demonstrates toward chess. Among such the forms take the most learned guise and consist of the most unusual sort of words. With the adepts any word that has ever been printed in an English book is allowable, and thus there is a great selection [[21]]of exotic words in various spellings from old gazetteers, books of travel, etc. The adept delights in words that no one has ever heard of before. Here are several examples of recondite ingenuities.

By Mentor, in The Enigma

M	A	L	E	G	A	G	E	S
A	D	E	N	O	C	E	L	E
L	E	U	C	A	E	M	I	C
E	N	C	O	R	T	I	N	E
G	O	A	R	L	I	N	G	S
A	C	E	T	I	F	I	E	S
G	E	M	I	N	I	A	N	I
E	L	I	N	G	E	N	I	O
S	E	C	E	S	S	I	O	N

By Gemini, in The Enigma

					V
				R	E	S
			I	O	N	S
		I	N	S	E	R	T	S
	R	O	S	E	T	R	E	E	S
V	E	N	E	T	I	A	N	R	E	D
	S	E	R	R	A	T	I	O	N
		S	T	E	N	I	O	N
			S	E	R	O	N
				S	E	N
					D

By Neophyte, in the Sunday Magazine, New York World

Z	I	K	R			H	O	O	D
I	X	I	A			O	L	L	A
K	I	W	I			O	L	I	D
R	A	I	D	Y	A	D	A	D	O
			Y	U	G	A
			A	G	N	I
L	E	W	D	A	I	S	U	S	U
E	R	I	A			U	N	I	T
W	I	L	L			S	I	V	A
D	A	L	I			U	T	A	S