Puzzle began as a verb for bafflement in the 1590s
Puzzles dare you to restore hidden order—whether sliding wood, chasing a proof, or answering a riddle of logic. Most exist for play, yet a few begin as stubborn mathematical questions whose answers move research. As a verb, puzzle shows up in the OED by the late 1500s, including Dudley’s West Indies narrative from 1594–95.
The word later became a noun, first meaning the state of being baffled and only afterwards the problem that causes it. The Oxford English Dictionary calls its origin unknown, floating Old English puslian, to pick out, or a link to pose. The formal study of puzzles even has a name, enigmatology. Solvers need to spot patterns and follow a particular order; strong inductive reasoners tend to shine at pattern puzzles, while inquiry-and-discovery puzzles favour good deduction, a skill that improves with practice.
The earliest documented puzzles are riddles, such as the Sphinx’s in Greek myth, and the Middle Ages produced many more. China’s nine linked rings, a device demanding mathematical calculation, date from the Warring States period of 475 to 221 BC. Around 1760 the British engraver and mapmaker John Spilsbury glued a map to wood and sawed around each country, creating the jigsaw as a geography teaching aid, its main use until about 1820. By the early twentieth century newspapers were boosting sales with puzzle contests, first crosswords and much later sudoku.
The range is enormous: missing-square illusions and impossible problems like the three utilities puzzle, Japanese sangaku temple tablets, the knight’s tour and eight queens on the chessboard, sliding puzzles such as the 15 Puzzle and Sokoban, puzzle boxes that hide jewellery, and metapuzzles combining others. The Japanese publisher Nikoli popularised sudoku, Kakuro, Slitherlink and Nurikabe, and word games run from anagrams and ciphers to Scrabble, Boggle and the game show Wheel of Fortune.
Ravensburger has made a jigsaw of 40,320 pieces, while LaserZentrum Hannover cut the smallest puzzle ever, five square millimetres, about the size of a sand grain.
Source: Puzzle
