The History of Scrabble

Scrabble – subject of fiercely fought national tournaments in the UK, US, and Australia, arouser of vocabulist passion, and inspiration of literary comment. Who would have thought that it started out as the unpublished game called Lexico, the brainchild of an out-of-work Connecticut architect in the Depression year of 1931.

A study of the games market led Alfred Butts to pick on words as the basis of a new development. Lexico itself was not unlike its near-namesake Lexicon, in that the equipment consisted simply of tiles with letters, but no board. Following a procedure akin to Rummy, a fad card game of the time, the winner was the first to complete a seven-letter word and lay it face up on the table. For variety, Butts later accorded point-values to the letters, and when one player went out the others could subsequently score for making words of four or more letters. He offered it in this form to several manufacturers, but without success.

Architect Butts naturally went back to the drawing board, and duly came up with the idea of adding a board to the equipment and playing tiles to it in the manner of crosswords, which had then only recently become a craze. Now renamed ‘It’, the game was offered again to the manufacturers, and again turned down as being ‘too intellectual’, no doubt on the popular but conveniently unprovable business theory that ‘No one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the public’. The new title may not have helped matters. ‘It’ had been coined by romantic writer Elinor Glyn in the previous decade as a synonym for sex, especially as embodied in silent film star Clara Bow. The game was evidently not as sexy as it sounded – which is perhaps ironic, in view of today’s use of ‘playing Scrabble’ as a phrase rich in euphemistic suggestiveness.

In 1939 Butts was introduced by a mutual friend to James Brunot, who had been looking for a suitable business to develop away from the city lights and rat-race. Brunot liked the look of what was now called Criss-Cross Words, and started experimenting with it himself. War intervened to hold this up, and by 1942 Butts and his wife were making up game sets and marketing them through one Chester Ives, a bookshop owner in Danbury, Connecticut, who undertook the manufacture of the boards. This came to nothing, or nothing to write home about, and for a while it seemed as if Butts’s brainchild would remain forever the Peter Pan of the games world.

In 1947, however, James Brunot re-entered the picture by returning from Washington, where he had been the wartime executive director of the President’s War Relief and Control Board. Brunot had made one or two changes to the game, including the rule about starting across the middle instead of in the top left corner, and, perhaps more inspirationally, changing the name to Scrabble. No particular significance attached to the word: it just happened to be one of several nice-sounding possibilities that research showed had not already been registered as a trade name. (But would the game have been so successful had it been published, as it nearly was, under the title Logo-Loco?) Under a new arrangement between the two, Brunot would manufacture and market the newly named game through his business facility, the Production and Marketing Company.

In the three years from 1949 to 1951 sales of Scrabble remained at the disappointingly low level of under 10,000 per annum. It was only in 1952, when Jack Strauss played and enjoyed it on holiday, that the game found the break it had been looking for. Strauss was surprised on returning to work to learn that Scrabble was not on sale at New York City’s famous department store, Macy’s. Once there, everybody who was anybody started buying it. The game caught on and became a national craze. Within two years, Brunot’s company had sold over four million sets.

Shortly after, Brunot sold to Selchow and Righter (who had long ago rejected Criss-Cross Words) the rights to the manufacture of the standard set, retaining for himself those for non-standard and speciality editions. He kept these until 1971, eventually selling out his entire interest to Selchow and Righter. Scrabble was introduced to Australia in 1953, being published there by T. R. Urban, and in 1954 to the UK through J. W. Spear and Son, who continue to market and promote the game.

In 1971 Scrabble achieved the status of national tournament play through the enthusiasm of games fanatic Gyles Brandreth. Brandreth had been struck by the popularity of the game in British prisons, on which he was then writing a book. Intrigued by its tournament possibilities, he put an advertisement in The Times newspaper to assess possible support. The response was overwhelming, and, with the ready co-operation of Spears Games, the British National Scrabble Championships have become an annual event attracting thousands of competitors.