Welcome to the Only Sudoku website. We hope you will come to love sokuko puzzles which is sweeping the world much as crosswords did 80 years ago.

The principle, which we’ve explained on the home page, is simple and in this way, Sudoku (pronounced sue doe koo) has much in common with its younger relative, the crossword. Yes, younger, because Sudoku predates the word puzzle by nearly 230 years!

History of the SUDOKU puzzle

Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler produced the first Soduko puzzle in 1783, calling it Latin Squares. Fast forward to the 1980s when an American publication introduced the puzzle as Number Place. Japanese puzzle publisher Nikoli picked up the idea and gave Sudoku its name for which it is known by today.

Incidentally, the word is Japanese for single number, but could also translate to one singularity or soul. Over the years the exact spelling of this game has been debated and is commonly refered to as Soduko, Sudoku, Suduko, Soduku, and Sodoku.

Next, Kiwi Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge found the puzzle in a Japanese bookstore and spent the next few years refining it before introducing it to British newspapers, from there Sudoku caught on like wildfire and the numbers craze has spread worldwide.