The Origins of Scrabble: From Lexiko to a Worldwide Classic
Scrabble is one of the best-selling board games of all time, played in dozens of languages around the world. But it started as a home project by an unemployed architect during the Great Depression, and almost nobody wanted it.
An architect out of work
In the early 1930s, Alfred Mosher Butts, an architect in New York, lost his job as the Great Depression deepened. With time on his hands, he set out to invent a game. He studied the games people already played and noticed they fell into three groups: number games like dice, move games like chess and checkers, and word games like anagrams. He decided to combine the luck of drawing tiles with the skill of making words.
Lexiko: the first version
Butts's first game was called Lexiko. It had no board. Players drew letter tiles and tried to make words from them, scoring points based on word length. Butts made sets by hand and tried to sell them, but game manufacturers weren't interested.
Counting letters in the newspaper
One of Butts's most lasting decisions was how many of each letter to include and how many points each one should be worth. To get it right, he analysed how often letters appeared in English text, including the front page of The New York Times. Common letters like E got many tiles and a low value; rare letters like Q and Z got a single tile and a high value. With small changes, the distribution he worked out is still used in English Scrabble sets today: 100 tiles, including two blanks.
Criss-Crosswords: adding the board
Butts kept improving the game. He added a board, so words would interlock like a crossword, and settled on a rack of seven tiles. By the late 1930s, the game was called Criss-Crosswords. He continued to make sets by hand and sell a few to friends, but established game companies again turned it down.
James Brunot and the name "Scrabble"
The breakthrough came after the Second World War. James Brunot, who lived in Connecticut and owned one of the early sets, offered to manufacture the game in exchange for paying Butts a royalty on every set sold. Brunot made a few changes: he simplified the rules, redesigned the board and added the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles. In 1948 he trademarked the new name: Scrabble, a word meaning to scratch or grope around frantically.
Brunot and his family made the sets themselves in a converted schoolhouse in Connecticut. Sales were slow at first: in 1949 they made about 2,400 sets and lost money.
The boom of the 1950s
Then, in the early 1950s, sales suddenly took off. According to a well-known story, the president of Macy's department store played the game on holiday, then found his store didn't stock it and placed a large order. Whatever the exact cause, demand quickly outgrew what Brunot's small workshop could produce. In 1952 he licensed manufacturing to the established game company Selchow & Righter, which had once rejected the game. By 1954, nearly four million sets were selling a year.
Going global
In 1955 the British company J. W. Spear & Sons acquired the rights to sell Scrabble in the United Kingdom and Australia, and the game spread across the world. Ownership has changed hands several times since: Selchow & Righter bought the trademark in 1972, the company was sold to Coleco in 1986, and Hasbro acquired Coleco's assets, including Scrabble, in 1989. Since Mattel bought J. W. Spear in 1994, Hasbro has held the rights in the United States and Canada and Mattel everywhere else.
By 2008, around 150 million sets had been sold in more than 120 countries, with editions in more than 30 languages. Each language edition has its own tile distribution and values. French Scrabble, for example, values K, W, X, Y and Z at 10 points each.
Dictionaries, clubs and championships
As the game grew, so did serious competitive play. Clubs and tournaments needed an agreed list of valid words, which led to official word lists such as the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary in North America and the Collins word list used in most other English-speaking countries. National championships followed, and today there are world championships in English, French and other languages. French-speaking countries have a strong tradition of "duplicate" Scrabble, where every player gets the same tiles and the challenge is to find the highest-scoring move each turn.
The inventor's legacy
Alfred Butts went back to architecture and lived to see his game become a worldwide classic. He received royalties for decades, though he never became especially rich from it. He died in 1993. The idea he worked out in the 1930s, counting letters in the newspaper and turning them into tiles, still sits in millions of homes.
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Early 1930s | Alfred Butts, out of work, invents Lexiko |
| Late 1930s | The board is added; the game becomes Criss-Crosswords |
| 1948 | James Brunot trademarks the name Scrabble |
| 1949 | About 2,400 sets made by hand in Connecticut |
| 1952 | Manufacturing licensed to Selchow & Righter |
| 1954 | Nearly four million sets sold in a year |
| 1955 | J. W. Spear & Sons takes the game to the UK and Australia |
| 1989 / 1994 | Hasbro (US & Canada) and Mattel (rest of world) hold the rights |
| 1993 | Alfred Butts dies |
Play with the same spirit
Scrabble began as a way to make words from a random handful of letters, and that's exactly what WordJumbler helps with. Type in any letters and see every word hidden inside. Then learn the words that strong players rely on, starting with all 96 two-letter words.