ABSTRACT
Before the creation of the crossword puzzle in 1913, puzzle enthusiasts were constructing word squares-squares of letters in which every row (left to right) and every column (top to bottom) reads as an English word-of ever-increasing size: the six-square in 1859, the seven-square in 1877, the eight-square in 1884, and the nine-square in 1897. (Most appear in The Key to Puzzledom, published by the Eastern Puzzlers’ League in 1906.)
But then progress stopped. Over the next eighty years, 869 eightsquares and 836 nine-squares were published in The Enigma, the monthly magazine of the National Puzzlers’ league (successor to the Eastern Puzzlers’ League in 1920). Most were laboriously constructed from the bottom up, aided by immense lists of eight-letter and nine-letter words in reversealphabetical order. Typically, such lists contained from 75,000 to 200,000 words drawn from many different sources and were issued in only a few copies. Puzzlers of that era apparently recognized that a ten-square was too difficult to construct by these methods; little attempt was made to assemble analogous lists of ten-letter words to aid in this endeavor.
