Words With ScrabbleScrabble, Words With Friends, Lexulous

by Adam NFK Smith

Scrabble: How the World Came to Play Words

BoomerYearbook.com, December, 2008 – The rule is simple. Search for words, select the right letter block, and send them straight to the board. Scrabble is the name of the game. Introduced in 1948, Scrabble continues to be the most popular word game with varied names such as Scramble, Skip-A-Cross, Spelofun, Palabras Cruzadas, Alfapet, Funworder, and Literati. The 15-by-15 grid game board is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in US and Canada and of Murfett Regency in Australia but was acquired by the Mattel subsidiary J.W. Spear & Sons in 1993.

The sale of Scrabble is one hundred million sets and it is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions. Its popularity in America is highly visible as one out of three homes own a Scrabble board set.

The history of Scrabble dates back to 1938 and its creation was based on a previous word game called “Lexiko.” Although both Lexiko and Scrabble use the same set of letter tiles, Scrabble creator Alfred Mosher Butts made an advancement in the distribution and point values and included The New York Times as a reference source. Butts was initially able to manufacture the set, but was not able to sell the game to any major game manufacturers. When James Brunot bought the rights of Butts’ Criss-Crosswords game, he decided to alter the name of the game to “Scrabble,” which means “to scratch frantically.”

Scrabble went into the TV airwaves in 1984 when NBC turned the board game into a daytime game show that ran from July 1984 to March 1990 and from January to June 1993. And continues to be ever popularized through the annual World Scrabble Championship.

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