100 Years of the Sunday Times Crossword

The Sunday Times Crossword will be 100 years old in 2025. It is the oldest of the 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 in The Sunday Times, to today.

Includes insights into the compilers and their methodology and the changes in style over the years, what readers said about them, plus tips on solving old-style 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