by The history of Scrabble involves the New York Times, a depression era lawyer, and a forgotten precursor game called ‘Lexiko’.
Word games have been with us for a long time. The first may have been the ‘Sator Square’, a game involving Latin palindromes that was played in ancient Greece and Rome.
Sator Squares have been found at archaeological sites across Europe.
Between then and now, other types of word play were common. Puns, riddles and anagrams have been found in surviving texts from Classical civilisation, through the Middle Ages to the present day.
People of all eras have loved playing with words.
The first modern word game was the crossword, which first appeared in the ‘New York World’, in 1913. Created by journalist Arthur Wynne, it had a diamond shape which provided its original name: Word Cross.
Word Cross was immediately popular, and spawned many imitators. The words of the title were eventually switched around, as ‘Crossword’ was a little easier to say.
Alfred Mosher Butts was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in April 1899. The child of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, from a young age Butts was a fan of puzzles, especially crosswords and jigsaws.
Butts attended the local high school, then studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Graduating in 1924, he settled in New York City, and found work at various architecture firms.
But the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and subsequent economic downturn, would stymie his career. Like many workers around the world, Butts found himself unemployed for an extended period.
With time on his hands, Butts turned to his hobbies. He completed a study of popular boardgames like checkers and chess, and began to formulate an idea for a new game that would combine elements of these with crosswords.
A word game, where the players made words from letters they selected at random.
Butts was an avid reader of the New York Times, to gauge the frequency of each letter’s usage in English, he studied the paper’s front page. Over several months he recorded how often each letter was used, the resulting data telling him how many times each letter should be included in his game.
The first iteration of it was simple.
The game had 100 tiles with letters on them, each letter was worth points; the more uncommon the letter, the higher the point value. Players drew a hand of nine tiles, and took turns laying out the best words they could (there was originally no board).
As letters were laid out, they were replaced from the pile, until all the tiles were used; the player with the highest scoring word total, was the winner.
Butts originally made the game sets by hand, cutting the tiles out of wood. He called his creation, ‘Lexiko’.
Butts played Lexiko with his wife, and friends. They enjoyed the game, but when he tried selling the sets privately had little success.
After some consideration, Butts altered the game, adding a board and adjusting the rules.
The new board included a grid for laying out the letters, and bonus tiles for doubling and tripling the value of points. Players now also had to link their words to tiles already in play, making the game more complex while widening the number of word possibilities.
The revamped version got a new name: ‘Criss Cross Words’, to try and capitalise on the popularity of crosswords.
Butts again tried selling the sets himself, but could only move a handful. He also tried to sell his idea wholesale to game manufacturers, who turned him down.
By the mid-1930s, the economy had improved such that Butts was able to find a job. Criss Cross Words would recede into the background again.
While he had not been able to commercialise his game, Butts continued to play it socially. He would later note to the press that his wife once played ‘quixotic’ against him, for 234 points.
‘She beat me at my own game,’ he quipped.
One of Butts’ friends was James Brunot, a fellow games enthusiastic and player of Criss Cross Words. After the war, in 1948, Brunot offered to try and sell the game again.
Butts happily gave him the rights for a 3 cent royalty, for any set sold.
Brunot improved the visual design of the board, and came up with what he thought was a catchier name: ‘Scrabble’. He streamlined the rules, and trademarked the new version.
Confident the game would be successful, Brunot and his wife converted an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, into a Scrabble factory.
The following year they produced 2 400 sets. Sales remained slow however, and the business initially ran at a loss.
Brunot managed to sell a few hundred sets, and the game slowly built a small following.
In 1952, an executive from Macy’s department store was vacationing in upstate New York, when he ran across Scabble being played in a resort parlour. Instantly taken with the game, he convinced Macy’s to place a substantial order.
The 1950s were a time of fads in America, with novelty items like hula hoops and frisbees enjoying sudden bursts of huge popularity. Scrabble would be another of these.
With backing from Macy’s, then the largest department store chain in the US, Scrabble suddenly became a hot property.
Orders poured into Brunot’s factory, which was expanded to employ 35 full time staff. Even then, producing 6 000 sets a week, he was unable to keep up with demand.
Overwhelmed, Brunot engaged Selchow & Righter, a major games manufacturer, to help with production. Having turned down the game years beforehand, the company now sought to cash in.
‘The Scrabble craze led to a deluxe set with a revolving turntable, a pocket edition for travellers, a junior version for children, foreign-language versions, even a television program. Gamblers played it for money. There were books on strategy and international tournaments for devotees.’
– The New York Times
Brunot would eventually sell his stake outright.
Butts retained his royalty arrangement, which even at 3 cents provided a substantial income. He later said, ‘One-third went to taxes, I gave one-third away, and the other enabled me to have an enjoyable life.’
He would also find success as an architect. In this field, Butts is perhaps best known for designing the Charles W. Berry housing project on Staten Island, which opened in 1950 and is still in use, housing 1 000 people.
Scrabble remains one of the world’s most popular board games. More than 165 million sets have been sold worldwide, with annual sales of around 1.5 million.
Many variants and alternate versions have appeared. As a child, our family had one of these: a straight up copy produced in New Zealand, hilariously called ‘Funworder’.
Scrabble variants have also gone online; the best known of these is ‘Words with Friends’, which boasts around 13 million monthly players.
The New York Times has even gotten in on the act. In a fun connection to the paper’s role in the development of Scrabble, they now sport a version on their app called ‘Crossplay’.
