Relive the glory of past crossword puzzles

Relive the glory of past crossword puzzles

100 years old in 2025, The Sunday Times Crossword is the oldest of the broadsheet newspaper crosswords which are now cryptic. Discover how the puzzles have developed over the years in this celebration of a century of crosswords, from 1925, when the first one was printed.

Get an insight into the changes in crossword styles over the years, plus valuable tips on how to solve these classic crosswords. Selected, edited and annotated by Sunday Times Crossword Editor Peter Biddlecombe.

As a general approach for books like this including very old puzzles, we recommend starting with the newest and going backwards in time. And as you go back, you will see things you should not see in modern cryptics:

• Unindicated anagrams

• “bare anagram” clues with no definition – these are usually relatively easy

• “wordplay” for part of the answer rather than all of it

• hidden word clues with a lot of text in the “hiding place”

• “fill the blank” quotation clues

• grammatical differences between clue definitions or indications and the answer or a part of it ― parts of speech, tenses, singular/plural and so on

• “padding” – extra words added to a clue to complete the surface story, but with no role in the cryptic reading of the clue.

• some dated culture and language