Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

For decades, American-style crossword clues held the rest of the world at arm’s length. But as the story of Indian puzzle constructor Mangesh Ghogre makes clear, crosswords function as a linguistic bridge like few other things can; why shouldn’t that bridge be constantly updated to reflect global culture? Natan Last—a constructor and child of immigrant parents himself—melds a profile of Ghogre with a smart, nuanced examination of the grid-based landscape.

In 2021, the psychologist and puzzle-maker Erica Hsiung Wojcik published the Expanded Crossword Name Database, a “list of names, places and things that represent groups, identities and people often excluded from crossword grids.” Because of English’s consonant-heavy phonotactics, crossword constructors make use of vowel-heavy French loanwords to fill out the grid—ete, oui, epee. That’s also, perhaps, why we know Jean auel, eero Saarinen, all the canonical iras. If vowelly nouns are so useful, why not arm constructors with an updated canon: Why not put eula Biss, Michaela coel, or yaa Gyasi in a crossword? One solver’s trivia is another’s lived lexicon; what’s “fair” to W. H. Auden might keep newbie solvers on the other side of the fence.