Scrabble

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.

American architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game in 1931. Scrabble is produced in the United States and Canada by Hasbro, under the brands of both of its subsidiaries, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. Mattel owns the rights to manufacture Scrabble outside the U.S. and Canada. As of 2008, the game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American homes and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are approximately 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.

Scrabble is played on a 15x15 board, containing 225 squares. Certain squares are premium squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple word" squares, 17 pale red "double word" squares, of which one, the center square (H8), is marked with a star or other symbol, 12 dark blue "triple letter" squares, and 24 pale blue "double letter" squares. In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL, but the original premium square color scheme is still preferred for Scrabble boards used in tournaments.

An English-language set contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value between 1 and 10. Each tile's point value is based on its frequency in English, with vowels and common letters such as L, N, R, S, and T worth 1 point, and rare letters such as Q and Z worth 10 points. The remaining two tiles are blank and carry no value. 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 millimetres (0.75 in × 0.75 in) square and 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, slightly smaller than the squares on the board. Each player uses a rack that conceals their tiles from other players.

In 1931 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the 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 gameplay. 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. Although 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 renamed the game Scrabble, a real word that means "scratch frantically". In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year but lost money.

In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot licensed the manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter, one of the manufacturers that, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the game. "It's a nice little game. It will sell well in bookstores," Selchow and Righter president Harriet T. Righter remembered saying about Scrabble when she first saw it. In its second year as a Selchow and Righter product, 1954, nearly four million sets were sold. Selchow and Righter then bought the trademark to the game in 1972.

Meanwhile, JW Spear acquired the rights to sell the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. In 1986, Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco, which soon afterward went bankrupt. Hasbro then purchased Coleco's assets in 1989, including Scrabble and Parcheesi. Mattel then acquired JW Spear in 1994. Since then, Hasbro has owned the rights to manufacture Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, and Mattel has held the rights to manufacture the game in other parts of the world.