Search for grid puzzles online and you'll run into the same picture under four different names: nonogram, picross, griddler, and hanjie. It's not a marketing gimmick and it's not four separate puzzles wearing a trench coat — it's one puzzle that was invented twice in Japan in the late 1980s and then picked up a different name almost everywhere it travelled.
One Puzzle, Two Inventors
In the late 1980s, Non Ishida, a Japanese graphic designer, created a grid-shading puzzle where number clues along each row and column tell you which cells to fill in — and which to leave blank — until a hidden picture emerges. Around the same time, Japanese puzzle maker Tetsuya Nishio came up with the same idea independently. In 1989 Ishida's puzzles reached British puzzle collector James Dalgety, who coined the name nonogram, after Non Ishida, and helped get them into The Sunday Telegraph from 1990. That's how the name took hold in the West.
How “Picross” Entered the Picture
Nintendo brought the puzzle to handheld games in the mid-1990s, starting with Mario's Picross on the Game Boy in 1995, branding it Picross — a portmanteau of “picture crossword.” The games were popular enough that an entire generation learned the puzzle through a Game Boy screen rather than a newspaper page, and for many solvers, “picross” became the default word for the puzzle itself, regardless of whether Nintendo was involved.
Where “Griddler” and “Hanjie” Come From
Griddler is the name used by several puzzle magazines and by the long-running Griddlers.net solving community, and it stuck because that's the label many readers grew up seeing. Hanjie is the name The Daily Telegraph uses for them in the UK. In Japan itself, the puzzles usually go by other names, such as Oekaki Logic or Illust Logic. None of these are wrong — they're regional dialects of the same idea, the puzzle equivalent of “soda” versus “pop.”
Nonogram — the neutral, most search-friendly umbrella term.
Picross — strongly associated with Nintendo's video game series.
Griddler — used by some puzzle magazines and Griddlers.net.
Hanjie — the name used by The Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Does the Name You Use Actually Matter?
For solving purposes, not at all — the rules are identical no matter what the puzzle is labeled. A clue row that reads “3 1” means the same thing whether the page above it says nonogram, picross, griddler, or hanjie. Where the name does matter is when you're searching for puzzles online: a site that only uses one of the four terms can be effectively invisible to solvers searching under a different one, even though the content would have been exactly what they wanted.
That's exactly why you'll see us use all four terms across our nonogram content here on The Puzzle Solver — not to pad a page, but because somewhere out there a solver is typing “picross” into Google while another is typing “hanjie,” and they're both looking for the same grid. If you've bounced between sites confused about whether you'd wandered into a different puzzle type by mistake, you hadn't — you'd just crossed a naming border.
The Takeaway
Nonogram, picross, griddler, and hanjie are four names for one puzzle, born from a double invention in Japan, a British newspaper, and a video game franchise that happened to pick its own label. Whichever word brought you here, the puzzle underneath is the same one: read the number clues, work out which cells must be filled, and watch the picture appear one certain deduction at a time.