Will Nediger, who placed second overall at the 2025 American crossword puzzle tournament, in his home in London, Ont.Brett Gundlock/The Globe and Mail
As a kid in London, Ont., Will Nediger spent long hours at his older brother’s hockey games – with his back turned to the rink and his nose buried in a book. Mr. Nediger’s father, Bill, a teacher, like his wife Dale, remembers losing Scrabble games to his middle child when Will was only 8. At the family cottage in North Bay, Will and his parents spent TV-and-internet-less summers playing word games. It wasn’t long before he was a budding quiz-bowl champion and Mom and Dad were asking him for help.
“In Grade 3, one of Will’s teachers asked the class to make anagrams from a word phrase and said he’d be happy if the kids could make 20,” Bill recalls. “Will made 120 anagrams, and it’s always been enjoyable to see where his mind takes us, usually in surprising ways.”
Will Nediger, now a bespectacled, 35-year-old linguist and father of two, finished second at the 47th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament last weekend, beating out more than 1,000 other solvers with quickness, accuracy and stamina, and moving up a slot over his finish last year at the prestigious event. Mr. Nediger is happy with his finish, but far from satisfied.
“I’m going to start doing some serious training,” says Mr. Nediger, a freelance puzzle constructor. Of the recent tournament, he says, “I knew I could hang with the big guns, but Paolo Pasco, who won last year, is a phenom. Everyone’s an underdog against Paolo Pasco, but I’m gunning for him.” (Mr. Pasco won again in 2025.)
Mr. Nediger creates crossword puzzles for a variety of prestige publications – he’s had 52 published in The New York Times – but to survive as a full-time freelancer, he also happily writes puzzles for birthdays, weddings and corporate gigs. His construction style is generous and playful, and Mr. Nediger says that while some constructors see themselves as competing against their audience, he approaches the solver with affection and joy.
“Sometimes people think of crosswords as a contest between the creator and solver, but the relationship should be a friendly one and my goal is to give players something satisfying to solve,” says Mr. Nediger, whose extensive vocabulary was honed by reading dictionaries (including medical ones) from the age of 6. “Ever since I can remember, I always loved words.”
The King of the Crosswords is New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz, who hosts the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament each year. Back in the day, Mr. Nediger would mail in his crossword-puzzle graphs to the Times office, and Mr. Shortz says Mr. Nediger stood out from the beginning. Eventually, Mr. Shortz asked Mr. Nediger to send his puzzles to his home address. The Canadian had moved into the inner circle of the crossword world.
“His first puzzle was very handsome – wide-open grid, lots of long answers, wide spaces, juicy vocabulary, very few black squares, and very little obscurity or ‘crossword-ese,’ ” says Mr. Shortz, who also calls Mr. Nediger’s work “simple and elegant,” rule-breaking and laden with inside jokes.
Mr. Shortz says he launched his tournament to gather people like him and Mr. Nediger once a year.
“Crossword people know a little about everything, are curious and have quirky minds, and are definitely nerdy, and we wouldn’t take that as a put-down,” says Mr. Shortz, who designed his own curriculum in 1974 at Indiana University to go deep into “enigmatology,” the study of puzzles. “I proudly say that I’m a nerd and I’d like to think if I was in a group of non-nerds, I could hide my nerdiness; at a crossword tournament, we don’t have to hide that.”
Mr. Nediger, for now, certainly is not hiding. Aware of his second-place ranking on both the New York Times all-time Canadian puzzle contributor list and behind Mr. Pasco at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, he has big things planned for the years to come. His children are 3 and 5, which means he’s sleeping a little better than in previous years, and he’s also becoming better equipped at handling the performance anxiety of solving puzzles in front of a crowd. In pursuit of the New York Times record, his father likens it to Alexander Ovechkin chasing Wayne Gretzky. Like Mr. Ovechkin, Will says, though the road ahead presents challenges, he’s hungry for more.
“Paolo said he was going to take it easy this year and have some beers the night before, but he won even more commandingly, so beating him is going to take some work,” Mr. Nediger says. “Still, I’d like to be at the top. I feel like it’s only up from here.”