Skip to content

Nonogram, Picross, Hanjie, Griddlers: One Puzzle, Many Names

· 3 min read

Nonogram, Picross, Griddlers, Hanjie: different names, one puzzle. Here's how it was born in Japan in 1987, where the word "nonogram" comes from, and how Nintendo brought it to millions as Picross.

One puzzle, dozens of names

Nonogram, Picross, Griddlers, Hanjie, Pic-a-Pix, Illust Logic, Oekaki Logic, Paint by Numbers… All of these names describe the same puzzle: the numbers on each row and column give the lengths of the runs of consecutive filled squares in that line, and the filled squares form a picture. The rules don't differ; only the name the newspaper, magazine or game gave it does.

There are so many names because the puzzle didn't spread from a single source. Different publishers in different countries brought it to their readers under names of their own.

Whatever you call it, the rules are the same. The board below is a cup:

1987: one idea, two inventors

The puzzle's origin is usually credited to two people in Japan. In 1987, Japanese graphics editor Non Ishida won a competition in Tokyo with a design that formed pictures by switching skyscraper window lights on and off. That work gave her the idea for a puzzle in which a picture emerges from filling certain squares of a grid.

Around the same time, a professional Japanese puzzle author, Tetsuya Nishio, invented the same puzzle independently and published it in another magazine. In 1988, Ishida published three picture grid puzzles in Japan under the name "Window Art Puzzles".

Where does the name "nonogram" come from?

Ishida showed her puzzles to James Dalgety, a puzzle collector in the United Kingdom. Dalgety offered to help publish them worldwide and gave them a name: Non from their creator's name plus gram from "diagram" became nonogram.

Dalgety made a deal with the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph, which began publishing nonograms weekly in 1990. It is still the most widely used name internationally.

Griddlers: the name readers chose

In 1998, The Sunday Telegraph ran a competition to find a new name for its puzzles. The name its readers chose was Griddlers, and it's still used alongside nonogram, especially in English-speaking countries.

Picross: Nintendo's picture crossword

The name that introduced the puzzle to millions of players was Picross, short for picture crossword. Mario's Picross, developed by Jupiter and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy, came out in March 1995 in Japan and North America and in July 1995 in Europe, starting Nintendo's long-running Picross series. That's why Picross is the puzzle's best-known name in video games.

Other names

Wikipedia adds more, such as CrossPix, FigurePic, PictureLogic and StarPic. The list is long, but the rules are the same in every one.

What do we call it?

On the App Store we present Gridora as "Picture Logic" in English and "Resimli Bulmaca" (picture puzzle) in Turkish, because for someone who has never heard the name, those words explain best what it is. In our articles we use the international name, nonogram. If you want to learn how to solve one, start with how to solve nonograms.

Sources

More articles