“The largest online crossword puzzle has 160,650 squares, with 32,252 clues across and 32,656 clues down and was achieved by Daiichi Sankyo Healthcare Co., LTD. (Japan) in Tokyo, Japan, on 29 August 2012.”
This is the sum total of the Guinness World Record for largest online crossword puzzle…and it’s also just about the sum total of information about the DSH puzzle. Googling “Daiichi Sankyo crossword” gets you nowhere. There’s no sign of it on the company’s own website, either. Granted, it has been more than a decade, but it’s not seen on the archived version of the website from just after August 2012, either.
Is it a good puzzle or a bad puzzle? Are the clues fair? Are the answers too obscure? Who knows. Some ambitious crosswords are no fun at all—but what bothers me is that no one seems interested in allowing anyone to test it.
“The largest published crossword has 66,666 clues in total with 33,018 clues across and 33,648 clues down, created by Nikoli Co., Ltd. (Japan) in Taito, Tokyo, Japan, and published on 30 June 2016. The crossword consists of 244,971 squares and measures 12.042 m² (129.61 ft²). The crossword was created by 20 crossword artists for celebrating the 35th anniversary of Nikoli Co., Ltd.”
Nikoli has a little more weight in the puzzling world, once hailed as the likely successor to the sudoku craze. Their homepage does boast of the largest crossword puzzle. But still…you can’t find or buy or glimpse this puzzle anywhere. I couldn’t even tell you, after twenty minutes of searching, whether either of the aforementioned puzzles are in English or Japanese.
“The largest unpublished crossword has 93,769 clues, created by Hristo A. Yonitsov (Bulgaria), as verified in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 3 June 2014. The crossword is 300 metres long, and is spread over 1000 sheets of paper. The effort took Hristo 14 years to complete, and many of the words were found in trips to the library.”
Yonitsov’s puzzle has the most coverage of the three. Yonitsov himself claimed it was not 1000 but 1001 sheets of paper, a nod to 1001 Arabian Nights, and its 300-meter length was to match the height of the Eiffel Tower.
He sounds fun.
But…you guessed it…you couldn’t access the “published” puzzles, so you certainly can’t access this unpublished one. I mean, it may be written in Bulgarian, but that shouldn’t stop the Bulgarian solvers.
The largest crosswords in the world shouldn’t be remote, inaccessible myths, verified only by Guinness and a few lucky witnesses. They should be out in the world, sharing their fun with the people. They should be solvable.
About this time tomorrow, the first piece of mine will be.