![]() Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. According to legend, Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. They made 2,400 sets that year, but lost money. Though he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the "premium" squares of the board and simplified the rules he also changed the name of the game to "Scrabble," a real word which means "to scratch frantically." In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, a section of Newtown. In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut – and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game – bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day. The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15-by-15 game board and the crossword-style game play. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out meticulously performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources including The New York Times. In 1938, architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. This was used to determine the number and scores of tiles in the game. History File:Alfred Butts letter frequencies.JPGĪlfred Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various length, using examples in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Times. 7 Scrabble "TV game show" board game versions.5 Console and computer video game versions.One hundred and fifty million sets have been sold worldwide, and sets are found in roughly one-third of American homes. The game is sold in 121 countries there are 29 different language versions. Elsewhere, Scrabble is trademarked by Mattel. The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. The Collins Scrabble checker can also be used to check if a word is allowed. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) provide a list of permissible words. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. Scrabble brand logo by Mattel, Inc., used throughout the rest of the world|250px]] used in the USA and Canada, until March 2008 used in the USA and Canada, since March 2008įormer Scrabble logo by Hasbro, Inc. In addition to scoring the most points by a single player in a game (830), he also set the record for the highest number of points scored in a single turn: 365 points for quixotry.Current Scrabble logo by Hasbro, Inc. who set several Scrabble records during a game in October of 2006. Of course, that’s nothing compared to Michael Cresta, a carpenter from Lexington, Mass. ![]() After all, his wife, Nina, was apparently a much better Scrabble player than he was - she once scored 234 points for the word quixotic. Butts were still alive today, he might not be too upset about the change. Chew receives a handful of tile value suggestions from players every year.Īlfred Butts, who founded Scrabble in 1938 and used the New York Times to calculate values, passed away almost 20 years ago. John Chew, the co-president of the north American Scrabble Players Association, told the BBC that the outrage of players would be c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-i-c (also 21 points). Scrabble purists are probably shouting cries of b-l-a-s-p-h-e-m-y (21 points) right now. ( MORE: Scrabble Player Gets Ousted From National Championships for Cheating) Other letters, he discovered, are now harder to play and should be worth more: U, currently one point, should be worth two, while G, now two points, should become three. The letter Z, worth 10 points, should only be worth six points. By his calculations, the letter X, currently worth eight points, should be worth five. Lewis created a software program called Valett that analyzes, among other factors, how often letters appear in the English language and how often they appear within words of various lengths. Researcher Joshua Lewis says that the modern Scrabble dictionary has made it easier than ever to play the game’s more challenging tiles, so he went ahead and recalculated their values. The values of each letter in the iconic word game Scrabble are based off newspaper pages from the 1930s, but times have changed since then, and so has our language. Follow Scrabble fans: your triple letter score might be in need of a downgrade.
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