It’s time to break out the boardgames and dust off the cobwebs, for today is Scrabble Day. The hugely popular word game was created by Alfred Mosher Butts – born on this day in 1899. To celebrate the game’s enduring popularity across the globe, here are seven things you probably should know about Scrabble. They won’t necessarily help your game, but they might come in handy in a table quiz…
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Letter Architect
Butts, born in Poughkeepsie to a lawyer father and teacher mother, was an architect out of work in Depression-Era1930s New York when he created the game. Discovering that most games of the time fell into three distinct categories – number games dice and bingo, strategic move games like checkers and chess and word games like anagrams – he wanted to create something that combined the fun of anagrams with the crossword, which had become very popular in the 1920s.
Tough Competition
Butts cut the first board and letters by hand, and experimented with the game while playing with his wife Nina and their friends. He later admitted that Nina was better at Scrabble than her husband, once scoring 234 points for “quixotic”. He said she: “beat me at my own game”. Quite literally.
New York Numbers
Butts had moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, by the time he invented the game and the neighbourhood pays tribute to one of their previous residents in the most apt way imaginable. You’ll find this sign at 81st Sreet and 35t Avenue.
Local Lexicon
In order to determine how individual letters should be scored, Butts studied the front page of The New York Times to calculate how often each letter of the alphabet appeared.
Word Up
The highest possible score in Scrabble comes from using the word Oxyphenbutazone. If you ever actually manage to play the word though, you should really pick up a lottery ticket too. To place it, you would need to join all seven of your tiles with eight already on the board. And there’s the small matter of lining it across three triple word scores too. You’ll be handsomely rewarded for your trouble though, with 1,778 points.
Criss Crossed Wires
The original incarnation of Butt’s game was known as “Lexiko”. He later changed the name to “Criss Cross Words”. After several game-makers rejected his proposals, entrepreneur James Brunot took it on – making a few minor changes along the way and renaming the game “Scrabble”.
Letters and Numbers
Since its humble origins, one hundred and fifty million sets of Scrabble have been sold worldwide. Over a million sets are sold every year in North America alone. The game is sold in 121 countries and there are 29 different language versions. There are no official figures available to suggest how many arguments it creates every year…
Bonus mention – if you want to convert your points into cash, you’d do well to check out the National Scrabble Championship, aka the largest Scrabble competition in the United States. Current champion Conrad Bassett-Bouchard ended a four-year streak for Nigel Richards in 2014, picking up a $10,000 prize for his troubles.
