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History
of Scrabble
Scrabble Competitions
Links
THE HISTORY OF SCRABBLE
• Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work
architect, invented SCRABBLE during the Great Depression in 1931.
• The game was originally named
“Lexico,” but Butts eventually decided to call the game
“Criss-Cross Words.”
• Butts studied the front page
of The New York Times to calculate how often each of the 26 letters
of the English language was used.
• After figuring out the frequency
of use, Butts assigned different point values to each letter and
decided how many of each letter would be included
in the game.
• Butts decided to include only
four S’s in the game, hoping to limit the use of plurals.
• The boards for the first “Criss-Cross
Words” game were hand drawn with his architectural drafting
equipment, reproduced by blueprinting and pasted
on folding checkerboards.
• The tiles were similarly hand-lettered,
then glued to quarter-inch balsa and cut to match the squares on
the board.
• Butts and his partner, game-loving
entrepreneur James Brunot, refined the rules and design of the game,
and renamed it SCRABBLE. The name, which means
“to grope frantically,” was trademarked in 1948.
• The first SCRABBLE “factory”
was an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, where Brunot
and friends turned out 12 games an hour.
• In
the early 1950s, as legend has it, the president of Macy’s
discovered the game on vacation, and ordered some for his
store. Within a year, everyone “had to have one,” and
SCRABBLE sets were being rationed to stores around the
country.
• In 1952, SCRABBLE was licensed
to Selchow and Righter Company, a well-known game manufacturer,
to market and distribute the game in the U.S.
and Canada. In 1986, Coleco purchased Selchow and Righter, then
in 1989 Coleco was purchased by Hasbro.
•The first SCRABBLE world championship
was held in London in 1991.
• Over 100 million sets of SCRABBLE
have been sold in 29 languages.
ABOUT SCRABBLE COMPETITIONS
• Today, the National SCRABBLE Association
(NSA) represents 10,000 word game enthusiasts throughout the United
States and Canada.
• It sanctions more than 175
local SCRABBLE tournaments annually, hosts the National Scrabble
Championship, and organizes the School SCRABBLE Program.
• As Chaikin and Petrillo point
out in Word Wars, the NSA is responsible for maintaining
decorum during championships, and has had to introduce
rules outlawing bad manners, foul language and intimidation of other
players.
• According to the NSA tournament
rules, each combatant in a two-player match is allotted 25 minutes
to complete all moves.
• Players are penalized 10 points
for going overtime up to one minute, and an additional 10 points
for every minute after that (any word challenge takes
place when the clock is neutralized).
• A win is determined when a
player successfully plays all of his or her tiles, or when none
remain to be drawn; or, there are six successive scores
of zero resulting from passes, exchanges or challenges.
Sources:
Hasbro, www.hasbro.com
Mind Sports Worldwide, www.msoworld.com
Scrabble is a registered trademark. All intellectual
property rights in and to the game are owned in the USA and Canada
by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear
and Sons, PLC of Enfield, Middlesex, England, a subsidiary of Mattel
Inc.
LINKS
DISCOVERY
TIMES CHANNEL
NATIONAL SCRABBLE ASSOCIATION
TITLE:
SCRABBLE FAQ
JIM'S
SCRABBLE PAGE
THE
HASBRO SCRABBLE PAGE
SCHOOL
SCRABBLE
WORD
FREAK
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