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Here’s Why The Times’s First Crossword Is Nearly Impossible to Solve Today

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This story is part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism from The New York Times. Read more here.

The New York Times ran its first-ever crossword puzzle 84 years ago. Titled “Headlines and Footnotes,” the grid — 23 rows stacked neatly with a smattering of black boxes — boasted the bylines of Charles Erlenkotter, a seasoned constructor, and Margaret Farrar, the puzzle editor.

The paper had previously turned up its nose at such pursuits. But, in the wake of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Lester Markel, The Times’s Sunday editor, decided it was time to give a little. In a memo to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher, Markel urged a bold pivot. “We ought to proceed with the puzzle,” he wrote, framing it as an invitation to readers, fretting over a world at war, to partake in a bit of playfulness.

But we’d venture that even the most hard-core solvers in 2026 would struggle to fill the entire grid. Even Will Shortz, The Times’s lead Crossword editor since 1993, has no trouble admitting that it’s a doozy. It simply has “too many things I don’t think I should have to know,” he said.

Erlenkotter set the tone immediately with 1-Across [Famous one-eyed general], which references Archibald WAVELL of the British Army, who served in the military for over four decades. Later, at 30-Across [Name of 3 successive Pharaohs] solves for a moniker that’s hardly on the tip of anyone’s tongue: USERTESEN. This answer has not appeared in a single New York Times Crossword since.