A conversation with Merl Reagle takes some odd twists and tangents. Mention that you drive a Civic, and he tells you that it's the only model of car ever produced whose name is a palindrome. He has actually researched the matter extensively.

Somehow you start talking about theater and he tells you that Stephen Sondheim's last name is an anagram of "hedonism." Then he's offering first-hand, behind-the-scenes observations about "Jeopardy!" and Florence Henderson.

It's Reagle's business to proffer intriguing linguistic oddities and arcane bits of knowledge. For more than 45 years, he has created crossword puzzles for newspapers from New York City to San Francisco.

"I'm a word geek," said Reagle, who has lived in Tampa since the early 1990s. "When I was about 6, I started making patterns by connecting related words, the names of my classmates and things like that."

It was only later that he discovered that there was something called a crossword puzzle, a more formal version of the patterns he had been constructing.

By the time he was 15, Reagle was making crosswords for his school paper. He sent three puzzles to the New York Times crossword editor. She called one of them "tour de force" and used it in the Times.

"It had stacked 15s down the middle," Reagle said. "She had never seen that before."

Stacked 15s are 15-letter words, which run the entire length of the puzzle. Reagle said he hadn't even realized he had done anything unusual. But his puzzle with the stacked 15s made him the youngest crossword constructor in New York Times history. He held that record for many years, until the Times published a 10-year-old's puzzle.

Over the years, Reagle refined his skills and his puzzles. He learned some of the unwritten rules for sellable puzzles -- for example, it's cool to mention Josef Stalin or Idi Amin, but you can never mention Adolph Hitler.

There are more formalized rules, too. Perhaps the most significant is that crosswords (except for kids' puzzles and novelty puzzles) are symmetrical. Rotate a puzzle on a diagonal axis, or rotate it 180 degrees, and the pattern of black squares will be identical.

"I'd say 70 percent of people who do crosswords don't know that," Reagle said.

He's had some other jobs over the years, including writing for some obscure game shows, but he has always constructed crosswords. He's arguably the most famous crossword creator in the country, thanks to his hosting of an annual crossword convention and competition and his featured role in the documentary "Wordplay." He even appeared on "Oprah" and voiced an animated version of himself for an episode of "The Simpsons."

These days, Reagle creates one puzzle a week. It appears in papers all over the country, including the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and, starting today, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. (See Page 38.)

His puzzles are known for complex construction and clever themes. One of his favorites was titled "Gridlock," which featured names of cars, all intersecting and colliding with each other through the puzzle.

There's a delicate balance in creating a puzzle that will appeal to a cross-section of serious fans, he said. A successful crossword has to be both entertaining and challenging.

"Some people think of crosswords as tests and some people think of them as games," Reagle said. "The people who think of them as tests don't like the ones that are games, and the people who think of them as games don't like the ones that are tests."