A Fun Brain Game

For those of you who are not in the know, Scrabble is a game played on a 15x15 board that contains 225 squares on which the players take turns laying down letter tiles to form words. An English language set contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and have a point value between 1 and 10. The player with the most points is the winner. This game became so popular and iconic that it was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004, along with G.I. Joe and the rocking horse. But how did this popular word game come to be?

In 1931, a word-lover named Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on a previous word game that he invented, called Lexiko. He named his new game Criss-Cross Words. In order to figure out the point value of each letter and how many of each letter should be included, he did a frequency analysis of letters from various newspapers including the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and The Saturday Evening Post. He introduced Criss-Cross Words to multiple game manufacturers but there were no takers. In 1948, James Brunot, one of the few owners of the original Criss-Cross Words game, bought the rights to manufacture the game. He made some modifications including the iconic color scheme, the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles, and the name “Scrabble” and manufactured the game inan abandoned schoolhouse in rural Connecticut, producing 12 sets per hour. When it became popular, Brunot was unable to keep up with demand and he sold the rights to the game to Selchow and Righter. Although they had rejected the game as presented by Butts, they now decided that "(i)t's a nice little game. It will sell well in bookstores." (And boy does it sell well at the Book Barn!)

Hasbro owns the rights to manufacture the game for the U.S. and Canada while Mattel has the rights for the rest of the world. As Scrabbled gained in popularity, they began to hold tournaments, the first one held in the mid-1970s. Currently, the Scrabble Players Championship is held around July–August every year in the United States. The highest scoring word that has been played is quixotry which  was played in Massachusetts in 2006 and worth 365 points. (To peek behind the scenes of Scrabble tournaments, check out the 2004 documentary Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit.) 

If you want to jump on the Scrabble bandwagon, check out our games and puzzle room located towards the back of the Barn. Word nerds might also find games similar to or influenced by Scrabble including Bananagrams, Boggle, Perquackey, Quiddler, Upwords, and Scrabble for kids. Also, be sure to check out the book shelf across from the beginning of the biographies/memoirs. There you can find the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (published by Merriam-Webster) which is currently in its seventh edition of 2022. Though you might be able to find the most recent edition of the dictionary, you will be able to find previous ones. DJR