Scrabble

Scrabble is a popular word board game, in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a 15×15 game board. The words are formed across and down in a crossword fashion, and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works (e.g. more...

The Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, now in its 4th edition) which provide a list of permissible words, some of which are rarely found in standard English writing, are also available.

Each letter is worth a set number of points, with the value depending on the letter's frequency in standard English writing; commonly-used letters such as E or O are worth one point, whilst less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each scoring ten points. The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the amount of points awarded. Some premium squares multiply the value of an individual letter, whilst some multiply the value of entire words.

The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the US and Canada and of J. W. Spear & Sons PLC elsewhere. Scrabble was a trademark of Murfett Regency in Australia, until 1993 when it was acquired by Spears.

History

The game was created by architect Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938, as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out meticulously by counting letter usage from the New York Times and other sources. The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords", added the 15-by-15 game board and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.

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