📜 Welcome to the first of our TWIH puzzles, short for This Week in History: a new series of crosswords, one for each of the 52 weeks of the year. Each one gathers real events that happened during that week, so you can print the week you’re living through, every year. This first one covers November 1–7: sixteen moments spread across five centuries, three continents and one trip into orbit, from a painted ceiling in Rome to a railway spike driven in the mountains of British Columbia. Every clue starts with its date, a few carry a bonus hint in grey italics, and a word bank sits under the clues if you get stuck. Print it, or play online right in your browser. The answer key sits at the bottom — fold it backward along the dotted line before you start.
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You don’t need to be a history buff to finish this one. Every clue hands you a date and a short story, and the word bank lists all sixteen answers, so the real puzzle is matching each story to its word and fitting it into the grid. Here’s a good way in:
New to crosswords? Our complete guide to solving crosswords covers clue types and fill strategy from the ground up.
The TWIH series splits the calendar into 52 weeks that land on the same dates every year, so this puzzle is worth pulling out every November. To make the year come out even, the New Year’s week runs from December 27 to January 3, and in a leap year February 29 joins the last week of February. Every other week is seven days, always the same seven dates.
The first week of November turns out to be crowded. It covers an Old Master unveiling his life’s most famous ceiling, a plot to blow up a parliament, a tomb hidden under the sand for more than three thousand years, the first living passenger in orbit and a bridge that tore itself apart in the wind. Three of the sixteen stories are Canadian: one about a railway, one about a broadcaster, and one about a sport the whole world now plays. Two more are about radio and the birth of broadcasting.
Every date and detail in the clues was checked against museum, archive and encyclopedia sources before it went into the grid. A couple of popular stories needed care. The famous flying boat wasn’t really built of spruce, for example, and the night Britain still remembers is an annual tradition, not an official public holiday.
Like your crosswords packed with facts? Try the General Knowledge Crossword or the Geography Challenge. And for something with no word bank at all, the Hard crossword It’s Coming Down is waiting.
Spot a mistake in this puzzle? Report an error and we’ll fix it. Here’s how we check our puzzles.
Puzzle Pack: Word Play & Trivia