Game Research

History of Scrabble

Scrabble

Figure 1:  Scrabble         

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, bearing a single letter, onto a game board which is divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, flow left to right in rows or downwards in columns. The words must be defined in a standard dictionary. Specified reference works provide a list of officially permissible words. The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada; elsewhere, it is trademarks of homes have a Scrabble set.  The name of the game spelled out in game tiles from the English language version. Each tile is marked with their point value, with a blank tile the game's equivalent of a wild card played as the word first letter. The blank tile is worth Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American.

In an English-language set the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in Standard English writing commonly used letters such as E or O are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed. Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values. Tiles are usually made of wood or plastic and are 19 by 19 millimeters (0.75 × 0.75 in) square and 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, making them slightly smaller than the squares on the board. Only the rosewood tile of the deluxe edition varies the width up to 2 mm (0.08 in) for different letters. Travelling versions of the game often have smaller tiles (13 × 13 mm (0.51 × 0.51 in) sometimes they are magnetic to keep them in place. The capital letter is printed in black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value printed in a smaller font at the bottom right corner. In 1938, American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources including The New York Times. The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day. In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut  and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game  bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. Though he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the "premium" squares of the board and simplified the rules, he also changed the name of the game to "Scrabble", a real word which means "to scratch frantically". In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodging town, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year, but lost money. According to legend, Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order and within a year, "everyone had to have one. In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter, one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the game. In its second year as a Selchow and Righter-built product, nearly four million sets were sold. Selchow and Righter bought the trademark to the game in 1972. JW Spears began selling the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. The company is now a subsidiary of Mattel. In 1986, Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco, who soon after went bankrupt. The company's assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi, were purchased by Hasbro. In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC. Scrabble ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993. The show was hosted by Chuck Woolery. The tagline of the show in promo broadcasts was, "Every man dies; not every man truly scrabbles. In 2011, a new TV variation of Scrabble, called Scrabble Showdown, aired on The Hub cable channel, which is a joint venture of Discovery Communications and Hasbro.