Why we can’t stop doing the crossword

The first thing Eleanor Whitcomb does every morning, before coffee, before the news, before her husband even opens his eyes, is reach for her iPad and tap a yellow square. The New York Times Crossword. She has been doing this every single day for 2,341 days. She is 78 years old. She has never broken a streak.

I called her on a Wednesday in October to ask the question I have been quietly asking myself for the last three years: why do we do this? Not the crossword specifically — the daily puzzle, in any of its 14 currently popular forms. Wordle. Connections. Spelling Bee. CodyCross. 7 Little Words. The mini. The Sunday. The cryptic. Why do an estimated 60 million Americans now wake up and willingly hand a chunk of their morning to a small, deliberately frustrating word problem?

“Because it’s the only thing in my day,” Eleanor told me, “that I know I’m going to finish.”

The fight you can win

Most things in adult life, even the small ones, do not have an ending. Email is infinite. The dishwasher refills itself the moment you empty it. Children grow but never finish. Even the books you start tend to stack up on the nightstand at a steeper rate than they get read. We live, increasingly, inside an unwinnable list.

The crossword — and this turns out to matter more than I expected — has a last square. You either fill it or you don’t. There is a sound, on most apps, when you do. It is small and stupid and approximately the most satisfying noise on a phone.

“The brain genuinely treats puzzle completion as a reward event,” says Dr. Helena Berkov, a cognitive neuroscientist at NYU who studies what she calls “micro-mastery loops.” “You get the same dopamine response from filling a 5×5 grid that a chess player gets from winning a long game. The brain doesn’t scale the reward to the difficulty of the task. It scales it to whether you finished.”

This is, she emphasizes, not a complaint about humans. It’s an observation about the design of human attention. “We didn’t evolve to thrive in environments without endings. The crossword gives us an ending in 12 minutes. Frankly, it’s remarkable that one of the most popular cognitive products of the 21st century is just… a thing that ends.”

The 113-year-old habit

The first crossword puzzle, as we covered in our short history of the form, appeared in the New York World on December 21st, 1913, on a slow Sunday when the editor needed to fill a hole in the magazine section. It was diamond-shaped, called a “Word-Cross,” and the editor who designed it — a Liverpudlian named Arthur Wynne — thought it was a one-week novelty.

It is now, by any measure, the longest-running successful new-media format of the entire 20th century. Television came and went through five different formats. Newspapers nearly died. The crossword has just sat there, week after week, year after year, growing.

That growth has accelerated dramatically in the last six years. The NYT alone reported 11 million subscribers to its Games product as of late 2025. CodyCross has surpassed 200 million downloads. Wordle, a free word game built by a software engineer for his partner, was acquired by The New York Times in early 2022 for a price that has been variously reported as “seven figures” and “a lot.” Today its daily user numbers are on par with most major streaming originals.

Something clearly happened during the pandemic. Something else, less obvious, has been happening since.

What’s actually going on in your brain

Crossword research is not a new field. There are at least a dozen serious academic studies, going back to the 1990s, that have tried to measure whether crosswords “keep the brain young” — a claim regularly made by puzzle marketers and regularly debunked by neuroscientists. The most rigorous recent work, a 2022 NEJM-published study from Columbia University, found that crossword puzzles produced a small but statistically significant slowing of cognitive decline in patients with mild memory impairment, compared to a control group playing other digital cognitive games.

The result is real. It is also, Berkov is careful to point out, modest. “The crossword is not a brain-training miracle. It is, however, one of the only widely-popular forms of leisure that requires sustained, undistracted, ten-to-twenty-minute attention. That alone is…” — she pauses, hunting for the right word — “underrated.”

The cognitive demand of a crossword is unusual. It blends pattern recognition (the grid structure, the cross-letters), retrieval (“what’s a six-letter Greek philosopher”), inference (“if this is right, that has to start with E”), and a small but real amount of lateral thinking (“oh, the theme is hidden ‘ON’ sounds”). Few other cognitive activities work this many systems at once for this short a time.

And then it ends.

The streak is the thing

If the puzzle itself is the reward, the streak is the structure that holds it together. Eleanor Whitcomb’s 2,341-day run is, by NYT public-leaderboard standards, impressive but not world-class. There are several thousand solvers with active streaks above 2,500 days. The current confirmed leader, a software engineer in Seattle who asked not to be named here, is at day 4,147 — over eleven years.

What’s interesting is what these solvers describe when you ask them about their streak. None of them talk about the puzzle. They talk about the streak.

“The streak is its own thing,” says Tomas Reyes, a constructor and longtime solver who I spoke with for this piece. “The puzzle is the puzzle. The streak is a story you’re telling yourself about being a person who shows up.”

This is, on reflection, a remarkably useful kind of story. As Priya Anand wrote for us last month after she finally broke a 1,200-day Wordle streak, the loss of one is a strange small grief. But the streak does what most useful daily habits do: it converts the question “do I feel like doing this?” into the question “am I willing to break the streak?” And the second question is much easier to answer.

The crossword is winning the attention war

The most surprising data point I encountered while reporting this piece came from a 2025 Pew Research survey of how Americans aged 18–29 spend their first conscious half-hour of the day. The expected categories — Instagram, TikTok, news — were all there. But the largest single category, narrowly beating Instagram, was “daily puzzle.” Among 18–29-year-olds. Not 50-and-up. The under-30 set.

The puzzle that started the trend was, of course, Wordle. The puzzle that has carried it forward is harder to identify, because the field has fragmented spectacularly. NYT Games is the obvious giant, with the Mini, the full Crossword, Spelling Bee, Connections, Strands, and the recently-acquired Wordle. Outside that ecosystem you have CodyCross and 7 Little Words — both of which we’ve reviewed at length — plus a long tail of LinkedIn’s new mini, Apple News’ puzzles, the WSJ daily, the LA Times, and dozens of independents.

The thing they all share is the shape of the experience. You open it. You play it. It ends. It returns tomorrow.

The shape of leisure, redrawn

I’ve been thinking, since my conversation with Eleanor, about what the crossword actually replaces. Not at a media-spending level — the data on that is messy — but at the level of what we used to do in the 12 minutes between waking up and starting our day.

The honest answer, for me, is that the crossword has replaced reading the news. I am not sure how to feel about this. The news, as a daily product, has gotten worse. Or at least less rewarding. Or at least it does not end. The crossword does. Tomorrow there will be a new one.

Eleanor put it more elegantly when I asked her, near the end of our call, why she does this every morning. “Because it’s small enough,” she said, “to finish before the rest of the day starts. And because at the end you know if you got it right.”

That, I am increasingly convinced, is the whole game.