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.
