Numbering a Crossword Puzzle Grid

Video Transcript

"The convention for numbering cross word puzzle grids has changed over the years and the first crossword puzzle we saw that the numbers were given to the first and last letters of the word and the clue went from number two to number three for example. Over the years it's evolved. So that you start on the top row and the first square that starts a word gets the number one. Then you move over to the next square that starts a word and that gets number two. So you continue all the way across. A standard Cryptic crossword grid will have eight numbers on the first row; sometimes only seven, but eight is probably the most common. So we see that most of them are actually both across words and down words. Number five, we see is just an across word and number six is a down word. Then we start onto the second row. From eight we go to nine. We have a word; nine down is the next one and no other words start on that row. So, we move down to the next row with the next number ten and eleven and so on right down to the bottom of the grid. The numbering of the North American style crossword is done in exactly the same way as the Cryptic. We start with one in the first square that starts a word and then number two and of course because we've got more words in this grid, we have up to in this case sixty three different words, whereas the Cryptic crossword typically only goes up to something like twenty six. In the Cryptic crossword, there are usually twenty eight to thirty two words, but some of the numbers start two words. So, the number of numbers used do not match the number of words."