Semantics of Persian Cross Word Puzzles: Review of Patterns of Lexical Definitions from a Structural Lexical Semantics Perspective

Cross word puzzles have gained special status among the amusements (linguistics, pictorial, logical, numerical, game ones) for being a universal and local amusement at the simultaneously. They are universal because there cannot be found any daily newspapers without them. As for their local character, they are designed and framed based on the specific characteristics of the native/ local languages and cultural patterns within which they are framed. The question of the present paper is what is the dominant pattern of lexical definition in these puzzles which guides us to the semantics of Persian cross word puzzles? The corpus of this study has been formed by gathering data from of Persian cross word puzzles used in Iran newspaper during one month. Structural lexical semantics approach has been used here to classify definitional categories. As for the results, they show that some factors like homography play important roles in the design of such puzzles, besides definitions based on socio-cultural and cognitive encyclopedic knowledge, collocations, onomatopoeias, colloquials, parts of idioms or proverbs, and nursery/ child-like wordings which are used there. Innovative ways of defining words like using language jokes or writing games have been spotted. These specific features show stylistic differences in designing cross word puzzles and lexical definitions of dictionaries. The findings of such a research is a step to the clarification of patterns through which general and specific cross word puzzles are designed. The present paper has some implications for the teaching of Persian using cross word puzzles.