59 Fun Facts About Scrabble

Which out-of-work American invented the game in the early 1930s in Poughkeepsie, New York?

Alfred Butts, out of work in Poughkeepsie during the Depression, reasoned that every game was a number game, a move game or a word game, and blended the last kind with crossword puzzles.

Before the crossword-style board was added, the inventor's earlier tile game went by what name?

Lexiko was the inventor's first tile game and had no board; adding a crossword-style grid produced its successor, Criss-Crosswords, the direct ancestor of Scrabble.

In what year did James Brunot buy the rights to manufacture the game from its inventor?

James Brunot bought the rights in 1948 in exchange for a royalty to the inventor on every set sold; in 1949 his family hand-made 2,400 sets and lost money.

James Brunot renamed the game Scrabble, a real English word that means what?

The dictionary sense of scrabble is "To scratch frantically" or grope about with the fingers; Brunot chose the name when he took over the game and rearranged the premium squares.

Early orders from which department store helped the game take off around 1952?

Macy's president Jack Straus played the game on holiday in 1952 and ordered it for his store; demand soon outran the converted Connecticut schoolhouse where the sets were made.

In 1952, which Long Island game maker took over manufacturing after having earlier rejected the game?

Selchow and Righter had turned the game down before licensing it in 1952; the Long Island firm bought the Scrabble trademark outright from Brunot in 1972.

Which company owns the rights to make Scrabble outside the United States and Canada?

Mattel holds the rights everywhere except the United States and Canada, having acquired J. W. Spear & Sons in 1994; that split is why editions differ across the Atlantic.

Hasbro gained the North American rights in 1989 by buying the assets of which bankrupt company?

Coleco had bought Scrabble's American maker only three years earlier, then went bankrupt in 1988; Hasbro's 1989 purchase of Coleco's assets also brought it Parcheesi.

How many squares does the standard board contain?

The board is 15 by 15, giving 225 squares, 61 of which are premium squares of one kind or another.

How many triple word score squares are on the board?

All 8 sit at the four corners and the middle of each edge, which is why a word covering two of them scores nine times its face value.

How many tiles, including blanks, are in an English-language set?

An English set has 100 tiles: 98 carry a letter and a value from 1 to 10, while the two blanks are worth nothing but can stand in for any letter.

Which two letters carry the maximum value of 10 points?

Q and Z are the only 10-point tiles; J and X are worth eight apiece and K is 5, the values being set by how rarely each letter appeared in newspaper text.

Which letter has the most tiles in the English set, with twelve?

E has twelve tiles, the most of any letter; A and I come next with nine each, and every one of those vowels is worth a single point.

What is the combined point value of all the tiles in an English set?

The 98 lettered tiles add up to 187 points; the two blanks contribute nothing, and the two 10-point tiles alone supply 20 of that total.

Playing all seven tiles in one turn earns how many bonus points?

Using all seven tiles earns a 50 point bonus on top of the word's value; experts routinely score three or more such plays a game, and much of advanced strategy is about keeping a rack that can produce one.

North Americans call a seven-tile play a bingo; what is it called in French?

In French the seven-tile play is called "Un scrabble"; outside North America, English-speaking players usually say simply a bonus rather than a bingo.

For the opening play, the star on the centre square doubles the value of what?

The centre star is a double word square, doubling "The whole word": an opening QUITE with the Q on a double letter and the last letter on the star scores 48 rather than 24.

When players draw from the bag to decide who goes first, what beats every letter?

A blank tile wins the draw for first move; otherwise the tile closest to A wins, and that blank-beats-A clarification was written into the box rules in 1976.

Why are the original wooden tiles barred from tournament play?

Engraved wooden tiles mean "Players can feel which ones are blank" while drawing from the bag, a trick known as brailling, so tournaments use smooth moulded plastic tiles instead.

Which word did Karl Khoshnaw play for a record 392 points in a 1982 Manchester tournament game?

CAZIQUES, plural of a word for a West Indian chief, stretched across two triple word squares for a nine-times multiplier, with a 10-point letter doubled and the seven-tile bonus added.

Michael Cresta scored 365 points with which single play in his record 2006 club game?

QUIXOTRY, played by the carpenter across two triple word squares, scored 365 points, the highest single play recorded in North American club or tournament Scrabble.

How many points did Michael Cresta score in his 2006 record club game in Lexington, Massachusetts?

Cresta finished with 830 points; his opponent Wayne Yorra added 490, so the pair also set the record for the highest combined total in a game, 1,320.

Which seven-letter word yields the highest possible opening play, 128 points, without using a blank?

MUZJIKS, a plural of the Russian word for a peasant, has 29 face-value points; with the Z on a double letter, the centre doubling and the seven-tile bonus it reaches 128.

Which 15-letter drug name is the theoretical maximum play, spanning three triple word squares?

OXYPHENBUTAZONE, an anti-inflammatory once prescribed for arthritis, would need eight tiles already on the board in exactly the right places for the full 1,778-point play.

Who won the first World Scrabble Championship, held in London in 1991?

Peter Morris, winner of the 1989 US national championship, took the inaugural world title and then largely quit competitive play to write baseball history.

The Scrabble world champion of 2007, 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019 represents which country?

The five-time champion was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and won his world titles in 2007, 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019, having learned the game only at 28.

In 2015, who won the French-language World Scrabble Championship despite not speaking French?

Nigel Richards memorised the French word list in about nine weeks before the 2015 win, and in 2024 repeated the feat by taking the Spanish-language world title.

The world's largest tournament, the Brand's Crossword Game King's Cup, is held annually in which country?

Thailand hosts it in Bangkok every summer, with thousands of entrants, mostly schoolchildren; Thai player Panupol Sujjayakorn won the world championship in 2003.

In 2015 Wellington Jighere became the first world champion from Africa, representing which country?

Nigeria's Wellington Jighere beat England's Lewis Mackay 4-0 in the final in Perth, Australia, at the championship organised by WESPA that year.

Which publisher produces the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, first issued in 1978?

Merriam-Webster published the first Official Scrabble Players Dictionary in 1978 and has issued every edition since, the seventh arriving in 2022.

The international word list was long called SOWPODS, an anagram of which two source list abbreviations?

The American and British lists were merged in the 1990s; Collins took over publishing the combined list in 2003, and it is now called Collins Scrabble Words.

The 2005 fourth edition of the OSPD added which pair of strategically prized two-letter words?

QI and ZA both let a player dump a 10-point tile without a U; the 2014 edition added DA, GI, PO and TE, and 2018 admitted OK and EW.

The 2022 seventh edition of the OSPD admitted which word, previously kept out as a trademark?

DUMPSTER had been excluded as a trademark; the 2022 update added it along with around 500 other words including YEEHAW, ZOOMER and BAE.

In 2021 the game's owner outside North America removed roughly how many derogatory terms from its word list?

Roughly 400 slurs and derogatory terms were cut from Collins Scrabble Words in 2021, a year after the North American players' association had removed slurs from its own list after polling members.

Which organisation took over sanctioning US and Canadian club and tournament Scrabble in 2009?

NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association, took over sanctioning clubs and tournaments from the old National Scrabble Association in 2009.

National Scrabble Day is celebrated on the inventor's birthday, which falls on what date?

The inventor was born on April 13, 1899, and died in 1993, nine days short of his 94th birthday.

In what year was Scrabble inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame?

Scrabble joined the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004, in the same class as G.I. Joe and the rocking horse; the hall is housed at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York.

Who hosted the NBC daytime game show Scrabble, which premiered in 1984?

Chuck Woolery fronted the show from 1984 to 1990 and again in 1993; its promos boasted that every man dies but not every man truly Scrabbles, and a CW revival premiered in 2024.

After a 2008 Hasbro lawsuit, the Facebook clone Scrabulous returned under which name?

Lexulous was the new name chosen by brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Kolkata after a Delhi court let them keep the game but not the Scrabulous name.

In 2020 the official Scrabble app licence moved from EA to which developer, which launched Scrabble GO?

Scopely launched Scrabble GO in March 2020; its boosts and rewards prompted such protests that a stripped-down Classic mode was added within months.

In Words With Friends, using all seven tiles earns how many bonus points?

Words With Friends pays a 35 point bonus for using all seven tiles; the rival app also uses 104 tiles and a different layout of premium squares from Scrabble's board.

A lawyer from which country invented Duplicate Scrabble around 1970?

Belgium's Hippolyte Wouters, a lawyer, devised the duplicate format, in which every player faces the same rack and board, and organised the first French-language world championship at Cannes in 1972.

Under what name was the game introduced in Sweden in 1954?

Alfapet was the Swedish name from 1954; from the mid-1990s the game was sold there as Scrabble, and the Alfapet name passed to a different crossword game.

Scarabeo, a home-grown variant played on a larger grid, comes from which country?

Italy took to Scarabeo, whose larger board and looser rules differ from the original; Russia's version is called Erudit and the Hebrew edition is Shabets Na.

Welsh-language sets contain single tiles for what?

Welsh spelling treats pairs like DD and LL as single letters, so the set has "Digraphs such as DD and LL" on their own tiles, along with CH, FF, NG, PH, RH and TH.

From 1979 to 1998, tiles for the North American market were made in a factory in which state?

Vermont's Fairfax plant supplied the tiles between 1979 and 1998; before that they had been imported from Germany.

Which Wall Street Journal sports reporter wrote Word Freak (2001), about competitive Scrabble?

Stefan Fatsis became an expert-rated tournament player while writing Word Freak; the later documentary Word Wars features many of the same characters.

In the variant Clabbers, popular among tournament players, what is permitted?

Clabbers permits "Anagrams of valid words", so EEAIORT is fine because ETAERIO is a word; the variant's name is itself an anagram of Scrabble.

Which tile-based title did the inventor release in 1985?

Alfred's Other Game, released in 1985 through the firm that then made Scrabble, was a solitaire-style word game and never came close to matching his first hit.

What is the cooperative mode on the reverse of the double-sided board unveiled in 2024 called?

Scrabble Together puts a cooperative version on the back of the board; its maker billed it as the first significant change in more than 75 years and aimed it at anyone who finds word games intimidating.

On the original board, what colour are the triple word score squares?

Red marks the triple word squares on the classic board, with pink double words, dark blue triple letters and light blue double letters; Hasbro recoloured the premium squares in 2008.

Which newspaper's front page did the inventor tally to set the letter frequencies?

The New York Times front page was among the texts the inventor tallied to decide how many tiles each letter should get and what each should score.

Roughly how many Scrabble sets had been sold worldwide as of 2008?

About 150 million sets had been sold by 2008, in 121 countries and more than 30 languages, with roughly half of British homes owning one.

After how many consecutive scoreless turns may either player choose to end the game?

Six successive scoreless turns, such as passes, let either player end the game; the other way it ends is a player playing out with no tiles left in the bag, earning the value of opponents' unplayed tiles.

How many double word score squares, including the centre star, are on a standard board?

The 17 double word squares run along the diagonals from the corners in toward the centre star; Hasbro recoloured all the premium squares in 2008 but tournaments kept the old scheme.

What penalty does a tournament player receive for going over the time control?

Overtime costs 10 points per minute or part of a minute, so unlike chess, running out of time is not an automatic defeat; tournament games are always two-player.

Phil Appleby's 1,049-point game, recognised by Guinness in 1989, was unusual in what way?

Such totals were often achieved under a now-unfashionable British 'high score rule' that counted only a player's own points.

For how many hours did Peter Finan and Neil Smith play in their 1984 duration record at St Anselm's College?

The pair kept going for 153 hours at St Anselm's College in Birkenhead in August 1984, a marathon recorded as the longest game of Scrabble.

What is the name of the Scrabble computer opponent created by Brian Sheppard?

Quackle is an open-source rival of comparable strength, built by a team led by Jason Katz-Brown.