Scrabble

HISTORY

While unemployed during the depression, architect Alfred Mosher Butts (April 13, 1899 – April 4, 1993) created a board game in 1930 that utilized chance and skill. He called Lexiko.

Alfred Mosher Butts

Butts worked out his letter scores by looking at the frequency with which individual letters appeared in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times. His basic cryptographic analysis of the English language and his original tile distribution have remained valid for over 85 years.

Alfred Butts manual  tabulation of  the frequency of letters in words

Eight years later Butts came up with Criss Cross Words, a variation on Lexiko. The new game added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style game play.

The first few sets Butts made he sold to family and friends but he made no money out of it.

The New York Times revealed that Mrs. Nina Butts was better at the game than her inventor husband, once scoring 234 for "quixotic."

The game went unnoticed until 1948 when James Brunot, from Connecticut, who was an entrepreneur and passionate games player, saw commercial possibilities. He bought the rights to the game, made some small changes to the rules and gave Butts a royalty on every set sold.

Brunot also changed its name to "Scrabble," a real word meaning "to grope frantically."

Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, a section of Newtown, Connecticut. They made 2,400 in 1949, but sales in the early days were modest, amounting, to a few dozen sets a week

Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from his holiday, Straus placed a large order.

Unable to meet demand himself, Island-based Selchow and Righter offered Butts three cents a game for the rights to mass produce Scrabble. In its second year as a Selchow and Righter-built product, nearly four million sets were sold.

Selchow and Righter was bought out by Coleco in 1987; After Coleco went bankrupt, Hasbro purchased the company's assets, including Scrabble.

National Scrabble Day is celebrated on April 13, the day Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts was born. Many Scrabble enthusiasts mark the day by playing the game with friends and family, organizing tournaments, or simply enjoying the challenge of creating words from letter tiles.

FUN SCRABBLE FACTS

The game is sold in 121 countries and more than 150 million Scrabble games have been sold worldwide.

Scrabble is available in 29 languages including Welsh (released in 2005) and Irish (2009). An unofficial Klingon version also exists.

The highest score ever recorded in a Scrabble tournament is 850, achieved by Toh Weibin of Singapore at the Northern Ireland Scrabble Championship on January 21, 2012.

The highest-scoring word set down during Toh Weiben's record-breaking game was BEAUXITE, which won him a whopping 275 points. 

The 2015 and 2018 world champion of French Scrabble can't speak a word of French. New Zealander Nigel Richards accomplish this by memorizing the whole French Scrabble dictionary.

"Qi" is the most commonly played word in Scrabble tournaments.

Roughly one-third of American and half of British homes possess a Scrabble set.

On average, more than eight Scrabble games are started every second worldwide.

The word "OXYPHENBUTAZONE" is theoretically the highest possible scoring word in Scrabble, netting 1778 Points. It has never been played.

There are 19 letter A tiles in Malaysian Scrabble, the most for any letter in any language.

The letter Z is worth only one point in the Polish version of Scrabble.

Scrabble has 105 acceptable 2 letter words.

In the game of Scrabble, 98 tiles have letters on them; two are blank.