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Essay

The Rush of the ‘Crossword Puzzle Moment’

A funny thing happens on the way to solving a puzzle. You don’t know the answer, and then you “concentrate” (whatever that means), which induces some mysterious biochemical reaction, and then you are transformed into a different state of being — a state of knowing something you didn’t know moments before.

For pure logic games like Sudoku or FreeCell (a solitaire game I wrote for Microsoft 20 years ago) or even chess problems, the process makes sense. While such puzzles can be arbitrarily difficult, the logical steps toward a solution are so well understood they can easily be expressed in computer code.

Fact- or trivia-based puzzles like crosswords seem to be different, though. No amount of logical deduction can help when a European river you’ve never heard of crosses a film star from a movie you’ve never seen. At best, you can say that some letters are more likely than others, but it seems that your only choice is to look up the answer or leave the square blank, and neither of those is entirely satisfying.

So given this apparent flaw, why are crosswords so popular? One answer is that when you look something up, at least you get to learn something new. Another is that (largely thanks to the stewardship of Will Shortz), crosswords in The New York Times now emphasize more wordplay over trivia — leaning a little toward the style of British puzzles, or what we in America call cryptic crosswords.

I believe a more fundamental answer is that you know more than you think you know. Dredging up those “forgotten” facts is not just satisfying, it’s addictive. I call the rush of recalling a long-lost fact the Crossword Puzzle Moment. It happens naturally many times a day, but crosswords provide the perfect environment for them.

I remember years ago reading the clue “ ‘Seinfeld’ regular.” I had never seen the show and didn’t know anything about it. My only hint was that the answer was six letters long. I got a single letter from the crosses, the E at the end, and suddenly the name Elaine swam into my consciousness.

I didn’t wonder if it might be right. I knew at that moment it was correct. Had I heard friends talking about it? Read a piece about the show in the Arts section? Probably something like that.

The experience has been repeated many times. I stare at a string of empty boxes, I get just one or two letters from crossing answers, and suddenly I’m sure of something I knew I didn’t know.

It feels good. It’s a Crossword Puzzle Moment. And already I’m looking forward to the next crossword.

Jim Horne, the original author of the Wordplay blog at nytimes.com, writes about puzzles from Seattle.

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