What is the History of the Board Game Scrabble?
Scrabble is a brand name crossword-style board game invented by Poughkeepsie, New Yorker, Alfred Mosher Butts. The game was first named Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words, before being trademarked 16 December 1948 as the Scrabble Brand Crossword Game. Scrabble continues to be a favorite game around the world and over one million Scrabble games are sold worldwide each year.
Scrabble is a brand name crossword-style board game invented by Poughkeepsie, New Yorker, Alfred Mosher Butts. The game was first named Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words, before being trademarked 16 December 1948 as the Scrabble Brand Crossword Game. Scrabble continues to be a favorite game around the world and over one million Scrabble games are sold worldwide each year. Butts was an unemployed architect at the time he invented the word game that would later become Scrabble. He analyzed all kinds of games and puzzles and discovered three main categories. He found number-centered games such as bingo, move-centered games such as chess, and word-centered games such as the crossword puzzle. Butts also methodically analyzed a front page of The New York Times to gain an understanding of how often each letter is used. This was important to Butts as he wanted the game to have random letter distribution, but still be challenging. For example, he cut the amount of letter “S” tiles down to four bec
