Crosswords, this newspaper sniffed in 1924, are merely “the pastime of a few ingenious idlers”, good for nothing but timewasting.

Eighty-four years later, that view has shifted slightly.

The Times crossword is now a national institution and The Times National Crossword Championship, which readers can enter from today, is recognised as the most prestigious title in cryptic crossword solving.

Americans, who started the craze for newspaper crosswords in 1913, still prefer their crosswords densely packed and their clues straight. For British enthusiasts, however, the fiendish deceptions of the cryptic clue present a more refined challenge.

This year’s finals will be held at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October. Last year the title was settled in a dramatic contest between former champions.

Helen Ougham, the holder, finished first having completed the three puzzles in 37 minutes and seven seconds.

Peter Biddlecombe, the 2000 winner, was 41 seconds behind her and only nine in front of David Howell, the 1997 champion. For the rest of the allotted hour the three of them sat silently in the large hall on the University of Gloucester’s Park campus, resigned to their fate, unsure of their answers and ignorant of the result.

Ms Ougham had made two mistakes, so the silver trophy went to Mr Biddlecombe, 47, a computer analyst from Buckinghamshire who runs a crossword-related website and a blog devoted to The Times crossword in his free time. He would have lost if he had honoured his own advice and spent 20 seconds checking his answers.

The 50 best performers from last year’s event are invited back this year but a further 200 places are open to readers who fancy a tilt at crossword immortality. The first of four qualifying puzzles is published today with the remaining crosswords appearing at roughly monthly intervals.

Entrants are trusted to submit the exact time it took them to solve the puzzle, along with a £15 entrance fee.

David Levy, the organiser and an international chess master, said that the key to success was accuracy. “If you don’t get this puzzle correct then you won’t qualify. Accuracy is more important than speed. But given that we have a lot of people who are very accurate, speed is very important as well.”

Richard Browne, The Times crossword editor, said that “anybody who has reasonable intelligence and speaks English” should feel confident of tackling the qualifying puzzles, which were no harder than those regularly printed in the newspaper.

Readers who cannot complete any of them can at least reassure themselves that they have been defeated by a unique sociological document.

"The Times crossword reflects how our society has become much more multicultural and multilingual in the last half century,” Mr Browne said.

“It used to be the case in the early days of the crossword that we were appealing to people with a public school, country rectory or Whitehall Civil Service background. You could bounce Homer, the Bible and the wilder corners of Shakespeare off them.

“Now we have a lot of people who don’t have that classical upbringing or even an English-speaking background at all. So we have moved much more towards word games and playing around with puns and the words themselves. We still enjoy references to Alice in Wonderland and the more familiar bits of Shakespeare though.”

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