The New York Times crossword puzzle is a daily puzzle found in The New York Times and online at the paper's website. It is also syndicated to over 300 other newspapers and journals. The puzzle is created by various freelance writers and is edited by Will Shortz.

The puzzle becomes increasingly difficult throughout the week, with the easiest puzzle on Monday and the most difficult puzzle on Saturday. The larger Sunday crossword, which appears in The New York Times Magazine, is an icon in American culture; it is typically intended to be as difficult as a Thursday puzzle. The standard daily crossword is 15 squares x 15 squares, while the Sunday crossword measures either 21 squares x 21 squares or 23 x 23 (a special set of 25 x 25 Sunday puzzles, with two sets of clues?easy and hard?was published in 1999 to commemorate the upcoming millennium).

While crosswords became popular in the early 1920s, it was not until 1942 that The New York Times (which initially regarded crosswords as frivolous, calling them "a primitive form of mental exercise") began running a crossword in its Sunday edition. The first puzzle, a Sunday, ran on February 15, 1942; the motivating impulse for the Times to finally run the puzzle (which took over 20 years despite the fact that its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was a longtime crossword fan) appears to have been the bombing of Pearl Harbor; in a memo dated December 18, 1941, an editor conceded that the puzzle deserved space in the paper, considering what was happening elsewhere in the world and that readers might need something to occupy themselves during blackouts. The puzzle proved popular, and Sulzberger himself would author a Times puzzle before the year was out..In 1950, the crossword became a daily feature.

That first daily puzzle was published without an author line, and to this day the identity of the author of the first weekday Times crossword remains unknown. There have been four editors of the puzzle: Margaret Farrar, who edited the puzzle from its inception until 1969, Will Weng, former head of the Times's metropolitan copy desk, who edited the puzzle from 1969 to 1977, Eugene T. Maleska, who edited the puzzle until 1993, and the current editor, Will Shortz.

Of the three former editors, Maleska held the position until his death. In addition to editing the Times crosswords, Shortz founded and runs the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament as well as the World Puzzle Championship (where he remains captain of the US team), has published numerous books of crosswords, sudoku, and other puzzles, and serves as "Puzzlemaster" on the NPR show "Weekend Edition Sunday". The popularity of the puzzle has grown over the years, until it came to be considered the most prestigious of the widely circulated crosswords in America; its popularity is attested to by the numerous celebrities and public figures who've publicly proclaimed their liking for the puzzle, including opera singer Beverly Sills, author Norman Mailer, baseball pitcher Mike Mussina, former President Bill Clinton, conductor Leonard Bernstein, TV host Jon Stewart and music duo the Indigo Girls.

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