A weekly crossword of astrology, mythology and the cosmos. Each new edition joins the archive, so you can reopen earlier weeks and pick up where you left off.
Filled cells0/105
Progress0%
Hints5/5
CheckReady
Across
Down
How to play
A crossword, told in the House of Zij lexicon.
Click a cell and its across or down clue becomes active.
As you type, you move along the selected answer. Use the arrow keys to roam the grid.
If you are stuck, whisper up to five letters or reveal the selected answer in full.
A new puzzle joins the archive every week, and the old weeks never disappear.
The origin of the game
Crossword, where words intersect
The first crossword appeared on the twenty first of December 1913, in the Sunday supplement of the New York World. Its maker was Arthur Wynne, an English journalist who had emigrated from Liverpool. He called his game the word-cross. It was a diamond shaped grid with a hollow centre, and readers were to solve horizontal and vertical clues and let the words intersect. That first puzzle even carried a small typesetting error, but no one minded.
Readers adored the new pastime. Within a decade the crossword had become a full craze, and when the first puzzle book was published in 1924 it flew off the shelves. At first the serious papers turned up their noses at it, called it a waste of time, but they could not resist. Today it has a corner in nearly every newspaper, in nearly every language on earth. The crossing of one word with another remained a simple yet inexhaustible pleasure.
At House of Zij we built these intersections from celestial words: planets, signs, mythological names. One answer reveals a letter of another, so every right discovery opens a new door. In astrology too, nothing stands alone. A planet crosses a sign, a house completes an aspect, and meaning is born precisely at these points of intersection. The crossword is an elegant way to play the interlocking language of the sky.
A planet crosses a sign, a house completes an aspect, and meaning is born precisely at these points of intersection.
