Gen Z gets the clue: Crosswords are cool

People are doing crossword puzzles everywhere these days. On the train. During a break at work. In bed before turning in. Crosswords have leapt from their traditional home in the newspaper and taken over phone and computer screens. 

And no generation is more thrilled about it than Gen Z.

Fifty percent of Gen Zers say they do crosswords regularly, according to a poll by Unscrambled Words, a website that helps users solve anagrams. That’s the highest share of any generation surveyed, outstripping baby boomers at 38%, Gen Xers at 31%, and millennials at 15%. 

“We are living in the golden age of puzzles,” says Will Shortz, who has edited crosswords for The New York Times since 1993. He holds perhaps the world’s only degree in enigmatology, or the study of puzzles, which he obtained in a self-created program at Indiana University. “They’re not just for old people anymore; they’re for everybody.” 

When Mr. Shortz started at the Times, which printed its first crossword in 1942, the paper had run puzzles created by teenagers six times. Today, Mr. Shortz says he has published puzzles by at least 75 teens. In 2021, Soleil Saint-Cyr, at 17 years of age, became the youngest woman to publish a crossword in the Times. 

Crosswords have also swept through student newspapers, demonstrating their growing appeal among younger audiences. The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia launched a puzzle section in 2024. Student Life, which covers Washington University in St. Louis, began publishing mini crosswords in 2022. Staff members upped the cadence from roughly weekly to daily in 2024.

As more young people are filling in those iconic black-and-white grids, here’s a look at some of the factors spurring the crossword renaissance. 

What’s driving the popularity of crosswords among Gen Z? 

Crosswords saw an explosion in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Natan Last, who last year wrote “Across the Universe,” a book that charts the history of crossword puzzles. That includes Gen Zers such as Luke Schreiber, a rising junior at Princeton University in New Jersey. 

“It started off as a bit of a pandemic hobby. My dad liked solving crosswords, and so that gave me the idea to try my hand at creating them,” Mr. Schreiber says.

Mr. Schreiber is one of two head puzzles editors at the Daily Princetonian, the school’s student newspaper. He has also published puzzles in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.

Some of the crossword’s success with Gen Z traces back to news organizations, which during the pandemic began to see games as a way to grow their audiences. In 2022, The New York Times acquired the viral word puzzle Wordle, in which users guess a five-letter word, for an undisclosed sum in the “low seven figures,” the paper reported at the time. The following year, the paper launched Connections, a game in which players try to group similar words or terms, and it quickly became an online sensation. 

By 2021, the Times Games section had 1 million subscribers; in 2024, a spokesperson for the Times told AdWeek that more than 10 million people played the paper’s digital games each day. 

Other outlets have hopped on the trend. Vulture, an offshoot of New York Magazine, launched a crossword in 2022. Defector, a news site covering sports, politics, and internet culture, started one in 2023, as did Apple News. And Time magazine recently announced that it would offer digital games. 

For students, Mr. Schreiber says, the crossword acts as a needed break from homework. 

“Students are looking for something that isn’t work – you know, isn’t studying or homework or something like that – but also isn’t a video game,” he says. A crossword is “considered a little more intellectual than a video game, but it still is fun and not quite work.” 

What’s some of the history of crossword puzzles? 

The now-defunct New York World is credited with publishing the first crossword on Dec. 21, 1913. Created by Arthur Wynne, the “Word-Cross” took the shape of a diamond and lacked the now-familiar black squares. Yet its huge success cemented it as a regular feature of the newspaper. 

A “crossword craze” swept the country after World War I as industrialization gave Americans more leisure time, says Mr. Last, who, in addition to studying the history of crosswords, regularly creates them for The New Yorker. People attended crossword-themed galas and wore crossword-patterned clothes. In 1924, a nascent Simon & Schuster boosted the puzzle’s profile even further by publishing “The Cross Word Puzzle Book,” a collection of the New York World’s puzzles and the first such compilation in the United States. By the next year, the crossword puzzle had even inspired a Broadway musical.

Though the Times is now one of the world’s foremost crossword publishers, in the 1920s, the paper dismissed them as “a primitive sort of mental exercise.”

Today, crosswords are the subject of yearly competitions and interest groups – many of them managed by or affiliated with Mr. Shortz. Examples include the National Puzzlers’ League, a nonprofit that holds yearly crossword conventions, and the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which Mr. Shortz founded and still directs. 

How has the crossword changed over time?

Young people have long been interested in crosswords – and have pushed them to change.

Mr. Shortz sold his first puzzle at 14, springboarding his now-storied career as a cruciverbalist. (That’s the shorthand for a crossword aficionado.) When he started at the Times, he endeavored to draw in a wider audience. “I think the crossword should reflect the life, language, and culture of everybody who reads the Times, and that’s everybody from smart teens up to the oldest people,” he told The New Yorker in 2023. 

Many young cruciverbalists agree with that sentiment. In the mid-2010s, independent bloggers began to infuse crossword puzzles with their takes on current events and cultural references, according to Mr. Last.

“Because you have a bunch of young, iPhone-toting solvers, they start to get into the puzzle once it’s become app-ified,” he says. “And they start to develop strong opinions about what at the time felt like a kind of dusty, occasionally arcane, and at times outright offensive cultural object.”

A crop of puzzle enthusiasts who turned to the game as young adults in this era of blogs are now leaders in the crossword community.

That includes Erik Agard, who this year won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and Paolo Pasco, who recently won the “Jeopardy!” Tournament of Champions. Ada Nicolle, who started a crossword blog in the 2010s, recently published “A-to-Gen Z Crosswords: 72 Puzzles That Hit Different.” (One clue asks for the real name of a “BTS rapper who also goes by ‘Agust D.’”) 

These young creators, Mr. Last says, have driven a cultural renaissance for a pastime that sometimes came off as stuffy and uptight.

“They treat the puzzle like a mixtape, and they treat language as powerful and arbitrating,” he says. “They are very, very focused on an inclusive puzzle – where inclusive is both political and cultural.”