Nonogram, picross, griddlers, hanjie, Paint by Numbers — all of it is one puzzle. Not a family of related puzzles, not regional variants with house rules: the same grid, the same number clues, the same logic, wearing a different masthead in each place it landed. The names record who published the puzzle and under which trademark — nothing about how it plays.
The tangle has a tidy origin. The puzzle was invented twice, independently, in Japan in 1987, and neither inventor’s own title survived the trip abroad. Nearly every publisher that carried it to a new audience renamed it on arrival — sometimes as branding, sometimes to stay clear of a name someone else owned. Follow the names in order, and the whole knot comes undone.
Is picross the same as a nonogram?
Yes — exactly the same puzzle. Picross is Nintendo’s trademarked name for it, a contraction of picture crossword, in service since Mario’s Picross reached the Game Boy in March 1995. Nonogram is the older, publisher-neutral term. Everything true of one is true of the other.
The identity runs all the way down. The full rule set — runs in clue order, at least one empty cell between them, every cell answering to a row clue and a column clue at once — transfers between the names without a single footnote. A picross tutorial teaches nonograms; a griddlers book trains you for a hanjie magazine. What actually differs between one product and the next is software and paper furniture: timers, mistake penalties, hint budgets, print size. Those belong to the publisher, not the puzzle.
Where did each name come from?
From publishers, almost every one. The puzzle itself appeared twice in 1987: Tokyo graphics editor Non Ishida saw a puzzle in grids of lit and unlit skyscraper windows after winning a design competition with them, and the professional puzzle author Tetsuya Nishio reached the same idea independently, in a different magazine — a double origin Wikipedia’s article preserves in both halves.
Ishida published her first three grids in Japan in 1988 under her own title for them: Window Art Puzzles. From there, the renaming began.
| Name | Year | Named by |
|---|---|---|
| Window Art Puzzles | 1988 | Non Ishida, for her first three published grids |
| Nonogram | 1990 | James Dalgety, from Non Ishida’s name plus diagram |
| Picross | 1995 | Nintendo, short for picture crossword |
| Griddlers | 1998 | Sunday Telegraph readers, in a naming competition |
| Hanjie | — | Coiner unrecorded — the name UK puzzle magazines used, Puzzler Media’s Hanjie among them |
| Pic-a-Pix, Paint by Numbers, Oekaki-Logic, IllustLogic | various | Publishers elsewhere, same rules every time |
The pivotal rename is the 1990 one. The British puzzle collector James Dalgety arranged to bring Ishida’s puzzles to The Sunday Telegraph, and coined a name for the occasion — Non, from the inventor, plus the tail of diagram — as his own puzzle-history archive sets out. The Telegraph ran the puzzles weekly from 1990, and the word nonogram traveled outward from there.
Which of the names are trademarks?
Three of the major ones began as someone’s registered mark: Nonogram, registered by Dalgety in 1995; Griddler, registered by the Telegraph Group in 1998; and Picross, which remains Nintendo’s. A publisher who wanted a name it could own — or wanted no legal entanglements at all — simply minted another. The list grew accordingly.
The Griddler story shows the mechanism plainly. The Sunday Telegraph had printed the puzzle as Nonograms for eight years when, in the summer of 1998, it ran a competition inviting readers to choose a name of the paper’s own. Griddler won, the trademark followed the same year, and the first Griddler Book appeared in autumn 1999. Same puzzle, same page of the same newspaper — new name, this one owned by the house.
What do the names get mixed up with?
Three confusions do most of the damage. The first is treating picross as a separate, harder variant. It is not — when the rules genuinely change, the name says so out loud, as in color nonograms, where clues carry colors and the gap rule loosens. A bare change of masthead never changes a rule.
The second is the phrase Japanese crossword. The grid wears a crossword’s furniture — numbers stacked where the definitions would sit — but no vocabulary appears anywhere in the puzzle; the adjective points at the country of origin, not at words. The label is genuinely common: the Russian edition of Wikipedia files the puzzle under exactly that title. What the clues actually describe is settled, cell by cell, in what a nonogram is, exactly.
The third is assuming the shelf knows something you don’t — that a hanjie magazine and a griddlers book must contain different hobbies. They contain the same one. Pick either up, and your technique arrives intact.
Which name should you use today?
Nonogram, unless you mean Nintendo’s games in particular. The clearest recent evidence: in March 2026, the UK publisher Puzzler Media renamed its Hanjie magazine to Puzzler Nonogram after consumer research found that solvers overwhelmingly recognize the puzzle as a nonogram, as reported by InPublishing.
Everything else is drifting the same way. Picross holds the console aisle, griddlers keeps its newspaper lineage, and nonogram has settled into the generic slot — the word left standing when no trademark is paying the bills. It is the name these notes use throughout.
Where to go next
The names settled, everything else transfers. If the puzzle itself is new to you, the opening ritual — which lines pay first, and why guessing is never needed — is worked in full in how to solve nonograms, from the first clue. Whatever the cover of your first book or the icon of your first app happens to say, you are learning the same quiet language as everyone else.
Questions
Is picross harder than a nonogram?
No — they are the same puzzle, so neither can be harder. Difficulty comes from the grid itself: its size, how dense the clues are, and whatever aids or penalties a particular app or book adds on top.
Did Nintendo invent the picross puzzle?
No. The puzzle was invented in Japan in 1987, by Non Ishida and Tetsuya Nishio working independently. Nintendo's contribution is the name and the games: Picross began with Mario's Picross on the Game Boy in 1995, eight years after the puzzle itself.
Is a Japanese crossword the same as a nonogram?
Yes. Japanese crossword is another of the puzzle's published names — the standard one among Russian speakers — and nothing in its rules involves words. The adjective records the country of origin, not the content.
Which name finds the most puzzles?
Use nonogram for apps, books, and websites — it has become the default generic term. Use picross when you specifically want Nintendo's console games. Every result obeys the same rules, whichever name it wears.