Scrabble (game show)

Scrabble is an American television game show based upon the board game Scrabble. Contestants competed in a series of rounds to fill in words within a crossword puzzle for cash. Muriel Green of Exposure Unlimited, a prize fulfillment company for game shows, developed the idea for a television game show based upon the board game concept. During 1983, Green convinced Selchow and Righter, who at that time owned the Scrabble board game, to license Exposure Unlimited to produce the game show. Exposure Unlimited co-produced the show with Reg Grundy Productions, and licensed the show to NBC. Scrabble aired on NBC from July 2, 1984, to March 23, 1990, and again from January 18 to June 11, 1993. Chuck Woolery hosted the program. Jay Stewart was the announcer for the first year. Charlie Tuna replaced him in mid-1985 and remained through the original run and the entirety of the 1993 revival.

A revival of Scrabble, hosted by Raven-Symoné, premiered on October 3, 2024, on The CW.

On May 19, 2025, it was announced that it had been renewed for a second season, with new host Craig Ferguson. On October 27, 2025, Ferguson announced on his podcast Joy that 60 episodes would be in production. The revival's second season premiered on January 22, 2026.

All words used in the game were between five and nine letters in length. For each word, Woolery gave a clue that often involved a pun or play on words (e.g., "Some people want him to get off their case" for "detective"). Viewers could win a Scrabble T-shirt by submitting a word and clue and having them selected for use in the show's opening title sequence.

The first round of every game was the Crossword round, in which two contestants competed to guess words as they were laid out on a computer-generated Scrabble board. Each matchup in Crossword was always male vs. female and was played until one contestant won by solving three words.

Originally, the Crossword round was played to determine who would face the show's returning champion, if there was one, in the Scrabble Sprint. In cases where there was no returning champion, two Crosswords were played and the winners faced each other in the Sprint to determine the new champion.

Beginning on September 29, 1986, as part of a broader format change, the show began featuring two Crossword rounds per episode. The winners would square off in the Sprint to determine the winner. The change was made as part of a special tournament that was taking place at the time. Once the show returned to regular play in December 1986, the first Crossword of the day began featuring the returning champion.

A horizontal or vertical row of squares was outlined to indicate the number of letters, with one already filled in and referred to as the letter the contestants were "building on". The first word of each game was oriented horizontally and built on a letter placed in the center square of the board. Each subsequent word built on one of the letters in the previous word and was laid out perpendicular to it (i.e., the first word was played horizontally, the second vertically, and so on). If a game went on so long that the board became too crowded to hold any more words, it was cleared and the next was played horizontally from a letter in the center square.