Google celebrates 100 years of crossword puzzles with doodle

What’s a 10-letter word for the 100th anniversary of something, in this case crossword puzzles?

Google is celebrating the centennial of crossword puzzles Friday with an interactive doodle on its home page. Users can head to Google.com to play the crossword puzzle, which features 78 words across and 70 words down.

Newspaper editor Arthur Wynne is credited with publishing the world’s first crossword puzzle in the Dec. 21, 1913, edition of the New York World, which called the game a “word-cross puzzle” at the time. The paper instructed readers to “fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”

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To build the Google Doodle crossword puzzle, the company brought on noted crossword constructor Merl Reagle, who makes the games for several papers including the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle.

As a hint for users who plan on taking a stab at Google’s crossword, Reagle told the Washington Post that he filled the puzzle with words that contain the word “fun” both forward and backward, such as “perfunctory” and “snuff.” This is a nod at Wynne, who once edited a newspaper section of the same name.

Users can play the game on Google.com and leave whenever they want. The website will have their answers saved for when they come back. Google does not plan to release an answer key for the puzzle, the Post reports, but rather, it will let users check each other using social network sites, such as YouTube.

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