Scrabble: A History

"Okay...now what can I make with a S, an P, an E, an L, and another L?"

I hope you all know what I'm talking about. The classic board game where you pull letters out of a bag and then burst a blood vessel trying to remember whether or not vacuum has a second u: Scrabble!

Scrabble began when an out of work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts (a rather unfortunate surname) decided to invent a board game. He studied the front page of the New York Times, made some letter frequency calculations, and came up with a game that combined anagrams with the crossword. He called it "Lexiko." Every game manufacturer he went to rejected his offer, until he met James Burnot, an entrepreneur who helped Butts solidify the design and rules. Eventually, Scrabble was born. (Scrabble is a real word, by the way. It means: "to scrape or grope frantically with the hands.")

At first, manufacturing Scrabble was a nightmare. The Burnots rented an abandoned schoolhouse, where they sat and stamped the letters onto each individual wooden tile. They still managed to turn out twelve games an hour. Considering what they were using, that's pretty good.

They realized that they couldn't manufacture Scrabble fast enough to meet growing popular demand. In 1952, the Burnots decided to sell the license to Selchow & Righter, a well know game manufacturer. Selchow and Righter purchased the trademark twenty years later, making the company the rightful owners of Scrabble. Unfortunately for them, their company was sold to Coleco Industries in 1986, manufacturers of the famous Cabbage Patch dolls. Three years later, they declared bankruptcy, and Hasbro Inc. purchased the rights, where they reside today.