A BRITISH engineer claims to have solved a puzzle that has counfounded some of the world’s best brains since the time of the Ancient Greeks.

Ted Clarke, 79, believes that he has devised the largest acrostic square — ten letters by ten, spelling out the same words horizontally and vertically — in the English language.

However, his claim to have come up with the “best yet” solution to the conundrum of the ten-square puzzle does not satisfy some experts. They say that because one of his words does not appear in any dictionary it should be disallowed.

Like the immensely popular numbers puzzle, Su Doku, which The Times introduced to Britain, the acrostic word square is based on a grid. The words must read the same horizontally and vertically and there must be no misspellings or leftover letters.

One of the most famous acrostics was found scratched on a wall in the ruins of Pompeii. It reads:

ROTAS
OPERA
TENET
AREPO
SATOR

It is unique in that it not only reads the same up and down and left to right, it also spells out a passable Latin sentence translated as “The sower Arepo holds the wheels at work”.

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Roger Millington, author of The Strange World of Crosswords, who has traced the origins of the acrostic to Ancient Greece, wrote that the creator of the first accepted ten-letter square would achieve “a lifetime of immortality”. Mr Clarke said: “I am not claiming immortality yet, but this is the closest we’ve got to solving this puzzle.”