There’s a story in the Yemen Observer about a Yemeni man who may have broken the record for the world’s largest crossword puzzle. Abdul-Karim Qasem has created a crossword puzzle that has 320,500 squares and an 800,720 word clue book. The puzzle took him seven years to complete and he needed to spend two days in bed after finishing it.
This story is an early favorite for strangest puzzle-related news article of the year. (a category where there’s not much competition.) Qasem claims that the previous record belonged to Tunisian man who had created a puzzle with 1800 squares. This is not true. The record setting puzzle that I know of has over 91,000 squares. Still, Qasem’s puzzle shatters that record fairly handily. Also, Qasem apparently used burn medication in his pens instead of ink when he was creating the puzzle. I was unable to determine the reason from the article.
The new record has not yet been confirmed by Guiness. Presumably when that happens, we’ll hear more about it from other international news sources.
Tags: crossword,guiness,puzzles,record
