Worldwide At Least 30,000 Scrabble Games Are Started – Every Hour!

Each year, on National Scrabble Day, April 13th, recognizes a game played around the world. National Scrabble Day commemorates the birth of Alfred Mosher Butts, born on April 13, 1899.

Originally named Lexiko, and then Criss-Cross Words, Alfred Mosher Butts eventually settled on the name Scrabble. The amateur artist and unemployed architect developed the word game in 1931, amid the Depression. Still, it wasn’t until 1948, after a final name change and a trademark that Butts finally began to produce the game.

• 1938 – Inventor Alfred Mosher Butts created Scrabble as a variation on an earlier word game and called it Lexico.
  • Alfred Mosher Butts, an out of work architect from Poughkeepsie, New York. He combined elements from anagrams and crossword puzzles to create a scoring word game. He derived the letter distribution by studying the front page of the New York Times.
  • You’re not really a superfan if you don’t know these obscure Scrabble rules that even serious players may not know.
• 1948 – James Brunot bought the rights to the game and called it “Scrabble,” which means “to scratch frantically.”
• 1952 – Jack Straus, president of Macy’s, placed a large order for this game after playing it on vacation.
• 1984 – Scrabble became a daytime game show on NBC
• 2004 – Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame
• 2019 – Merriam-Webster added over 300 words to the Sixth Edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. It is officially OK to use the word OK and these 14 other words added to the Scrabble dictionary.
• The word “scrabble” means to “grope frantically.”
• Worldwide, over one hundred and fifty million sets have been sold, with sets being found in nearly one-third of American homes.
• Scrabble history notes that the president of Macy’s played the game while on vacation and ordered a few games for his store. Sales soared, and within a year, the game was a huge hit, and games were rationed to stores around the country.
• Merriam-Webster notes that the top words to win at Scrabble include qi, za, phoney, retinas, xu, zlotty, hook, gyoza, bingo, and amigo. You’ll also want to memorize these 30 little-known words that will help you score big.
• The Official Scrabble Dictionary now includes words like “hashtag,” “selfie,” “vlog,” “mojito,” “chillax,” and “beatbox.”
• A study in Psychological Research showed that men and women play the game to meet different needs. Men focus their energy on practicing anagrams and evaluating the game, while women are more apt to play Scrabble as a hobby. There’s also this other reason men do better at Scrabble than women.
• How Alfred Mosher Butts created the points system. Butts came up with the system by taking the front page of an issue of the New York Times and counting how many times each letter of the alphabet appeared. He determined that the letters that occurred the most—such as E or T—would only be worth 1 point and be represented on the most tiles. Infrequent and harder-to-use letters—like Z and Q—were relatively rare, so Butts made them worth 10 points.
• The most points possible in a turn of Scrabble: 1,782. To get that, a player would have to form the word oxyphenbutazone (it’s an anti-inflammatory drug) while also hitting three “triple word score” squares.
• Ganesh Asirvatham is the world’s top-rated Scrabble player by the World English Language Scrabble Players Association. He has played 636 games, winning 450 games, losing 185, and drawing one game. His high game score was 709, and his low score was 264.
• Every hour, worldwide, at least 30,000 Scrabble games are started.
• Down the sides of sofas, underneath carpets, eaten by children and pets alike; somewhere in the world, there are over a million missing Scrabble tiles.
• If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were lined up, they would stretch for more than 50,000 miles!
• The original version of Scrabble, Lexico, did not have a board and was played with tiles only.
• According to Money Inc., Scrabble comes in fifth, only after Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and Monopoly.
• Scrabble is available in Braille.  
• English Scrabble has 100 tiles. Most tiles are in Italian and Portuguese Scrabble, which both have 120 tiles.
• Three out of every five American households have a Scrabble game – and more than half of British households.
• A study in Psychological Research showed that men and women play the game to meet different needs. Men focus their energy on practicing anagrams and evaluating the game, while women are more apt to play Scrabble as a hobby.
• Richard Nixon regularly played Scrabble in the White House. Other aficionados included Queen Elizabeth, John Travolta, Mel Gibson, and Vladimir Nabokov.
• The tile sets you buy at your local store likely have engraved letters, which aren’t legal in tournament play. “Players could braille the letters or at least know when they are drawing a blank,” says David Koenig, who has played tournament Scrabble since 2002 and was ranked in the top 10 players in North America. Tournament-legal tiles have letters that can’t be identified by touch, and players must hold the bag above eye level when drawing tiles.
• Attention Super Scrabble players who are getting bored playing with mere mortals: There is a new kid on the block, a robot equipped with AI and a camera. News flash: the robot wins every game but doles out consolation prizes.
• Scrabble in music:
  • Frank Sinatra added nine games of Scrabble to his take on the 12 Days of Christmas in 1968.
  • Kylie Minogue complained that the subject of her song “Your Disco Needs You” was “useless at Scrabble.”
  • In his song, “You Can Have the TV,” Barry Manilow also said that you can keep the Scrabble game, too.
• As the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary does not consider Y a vowel, the following two-letter vowel-less words are legal: by, hm, mm, my, and sh. There are also 34 three-letter words, 32 four-letter words, 38 five-letter words, and 24 six-letter words without vowels. As for seven-letter words, glycyls, rhythms, and tsktsks are the only three that are acceptable.
• Best two-letter words:
  • ax
  • ay
  • by
  • ef
  • eh
  • em
  • ex
  • hm
  • ka
  • ki
  • my
  • ok
  • op
  • oy
  • qi
  • sh
  • uh
  • up
  • we
  • xi
  • xu
  • za

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Readers Digest

Portable Press

The Fact Site

Gamesver

New England Historical Society

National Today