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 got invented twice, on opposite sides of the planet, before either inventor knew the other existed.
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, on the other side of the world, British puzzle historian James Dalgety independently invented the identical concept and called it “Paint by Numbers.” Neither knew about the other's work. When the two puzzle traditions eventually connected, the name that stuck in the West took a piece of its Japanese creator's own name: nonogram, after Non Ishida.
How “Picross” Entered the Picture
Nintendo licensed the puzzle for a series of handheld games starting in the early 1990s, 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 a trademarked name used by certain puzzle magazine publishers, most visibly in the UK and parts of the Commonwealth, and it's stuck around simply because that's the branding a lot of readers grew up seeing on the page. Hanjie is the term you'll most often see used in Japan and across parts of continental Europe, a shortened combination of Japanese words tied to the puzzle's line-and-number 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 — common in UK/Commonwealth puzzle magazines.
Hanjie — common in Japan and continental Europe.
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 story 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.