98 Fun Facts About Scrabble

Which out-of-work American invented Scrabble during the Great Depression?

Alfred Butts sorted games into number games, move games and word games, then built his own word game around the crossword puzzle so that it mixed luck with skill.

Before he added a crossword-style board, Scrabble's inventor gave his earlier tile game what name?

Lexiko had no board at all, only tiles, and the games makers he sent it to turned it down; adding a crossword-style grid produced its successor, Criss-Crosswords.

James Brunot bought Scrabble's rights in 1948 for what?

A royalty per set was all Brunot offered, and it paid little at first: in 1949 his family made 2,400 sets by hand and lost money.

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

To scratch frantically, or to grope about with the hands, is the dictionary sense of scrabble; the name arrived in 1948, when Brunot took over the game and shifted a few of its premium squares.

Which department store's 1952 order turned Scrabble from a slow seller into a national craze?

Macy's began stocking it, the story goes, after its president Jack Straus played the game on holiday in 1952 and found his own store had none; by the end of that year 6,000 sets a week were selling.

In 1952, which Long Island game maker took over Scrabble production, 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 Scrabble's 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 a standard Scrabble board contain?

225 squares make up the 15-by-15 board, which is why no Scrabble play can be longer than 15 letters.

Where do a Scrabble board's triple word squares sit?

The outer edge holds all eight, at the corners and edge midpoints, so a long word stretched between two of them is tripled twice, for nine times its value.

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

100 tiles fill an English set, 98 letters and two blanks; the inventor cut the first ones from wood by hand, and the mix of letters has not changed since.

Which two Scrabble letters carry the top 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 an English Scrabble set, with twelve?

E has twelve tiles because the inventor matched each letter's count to how often it turned up in print; A and I come next with nine each.

Scrabble's inventor was out of work in which profession when he devised the game?

Architect was his trade: laid off in the Depression, he went back to it once work returned, and six of his drawings were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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

50 points is the bonus, and it often outweighs the tiles themselves: a seven-letter word whose tiles add up to 20 scores 70.

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

Un scrabble: French borrows the game's own name for the play, in a country where the game only caught on in 1965, after a publicity campaign staged with Club Med.

The star on the centre square of a Scrabble board doubles the value of what on the opening play?

The whole word is doubled, because the centre star is a double word square: every opening play scores twice its tile values, so QUITE with the Q on a double letter makes 48.

When Scrabble players draw tiles to decide who goes first, which draw is best?

A blank tile wins the draw; otherwise whoever pulls the letter closest to A starts, so the one tile worth nothing in play is the best one to draw here.

Why are Scrabble's original wooden tiles barred from tournament play?

Blanks can be felt in the bag because engraved wooden tiles leave them the only smooth ones, a cheat players call brailling, so tournaments switched to flat plastic tiles.

Which word for Caribbean chiefs did Karl Khoshnaw play for a record 392 points in Manchester in 1982?

CAZIQUES, a variant spelling of caciques, ran across two triple word squares for a nine-times multiplier plus the seven-tile bonus; no tournament play had beaten it as of 2025.

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

QUIXOTRY covered two triple word squares, so its tiles counted nine times over before the seven-tile bonus; as of 2025 no North American club or tournament play had scored more.

Which seven-letter word gives Scrabble's 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 anchors Scrabble's highest-scoring theoretical play, across three triple word squares?

OXYPHENBUTAZONE would need eight of its 15 letters already on the board in exactly the right places, so the play, worth more than 1,700 points, exists only on paper.

Peter Morris, winner of the first World Scrabble Championship in 1991, later became an award-winning historian of which sport?

Baseball: Morris, who beat Brian Cappelletto in the London final, turned to researching the early game and won the Society for American Baseball Research's Henry Chadwick Award.

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

New Zealand: the five-time champion was born in Christchurch and took up Scrabble only at 28, when his mother suggested a game she thought he would not be good at.

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

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

The Scrabble tournament long known as the King's Cup, often called the world's biggest, is held in which country?

Thailand stages it in Bangkok; Thai schools teach Scrabble as a way of learning English, and the country has produced two world champions, in 2003 and 2009.

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

Nigeria's Wellington Jighere beat Englishman Lewis MacKay 4-0 in the final in Perth, and President Muhammadu Buhari phoned him to share in what was Africa's first world title.

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

Merriam-Webster has published the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary since 1978; the book is aimed at home and school play, so tournament players use a broader word list.

Scrabble's international word list was long called SOWPODS, an anagram of which two source lists' abbreviations?

OSPD and OSW, the American and British lists, were pooled into SOWPODS; most of the world now plays the merged list, while the United States and Canada kept their own.

The 2005 edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary added which prized pair of two-letter words?

QI and ZA came in as a pair: QI, a life force in Chinese thought, lets a player place the Q without a U, and ZA is slang for pizza; OK and EW had to wait until 2018.

The 2022 edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary admitted which word, once kept out as a trademark?

DUMPSTER was let in as a trademark gone generic; the 2022 update added about 500 words in all, among them YEEHAW, ZOOMER and BAE.

What kind of words were struck from Scrabble's international word list in 2021?

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

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

NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association, took over from the National Scrabble Association in 2009 and now runs the game's clubs and tournaments with no tie to the trademark owner.

National Scrabble Day falls on April 13 to mark which event?

Its creator's birthday: born on April 13, 1899, he lived to 93 and was still designing in his eighties, when he brought out a second word game.

James Brunot and his friends assembled early Scrabble sets in what kind of converted building in Connecticut?

A schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, abandoned and rented by the Brunots, was the first Scrabble factory; friends helped assemble the sets there until 1952, when demand swamped them and he licensed the game out.

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

Chuck Woolery had left Wheel of Fortune in 1981 after a pay dispute, opening the door for Pat Sajak, before he fronted Scrabble on NBC from 1984.

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

Lexulous was the name brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Kolkata chose in 2008, after Scrabble's owners went to court over Scrabulous and the game was pulled from Facebook.

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

Scopely launched Scrabble GO in March 2020 after taking the licence over from Electronic Arts, and a month later bought PierPlay, the studio that had built the app with it.

Which actress hosted The CW's 2024 revival of the Scrabble game show?

Raven-Symoné fronted the revival when it launched in October 2024, then stayed on as an executive producer when Craig Ferguson took over as host for the second season.

What does every player get in Duplicate Scrabble?

The same tiles go to everyone each turn, on the same board, so the luck of the draw vanishes and more than a thousand people can play one game; a Belgian lawyer devised it.

Under what name was Scrabble sold in Sweden from 1954?

Alfapet, a play on the Swedish word alfabet, was the maker Alga's name for the game; when Scrabble's owner withdrew the licence in the 1990s, Alga kept the name for a rival word game of its own.

Scarabeo, a home-grown variant of Scrabble, comes from which country?

Italy's Scarabeo allows what Scrabble generally forbids: acronyms and initials count as plays, and its wild tiles carry a scarab beetle, scarabeo in Italian.

Welsh-language Scrabble sets include single tiles for which pairs of letters?

DD and LL each fill one tile because Welsh spelling treats them as single letters; CH, FF, NG, RH and TH get tiles too, while K, Q, V, X and Z are missing altogether.

Until 1998, Scrabble's wooden tiles for North America were made in Fairfax, in which state?

Vermont's Fairfax plant made North America's Scrabble tiles for twenty years, a million a day, and the game's inventor was flown in to watch them being made.

What did Stefan Fatsis do while writing Word Freak, his competitive Scrabble book?

Became an expert player: the Wall Street Journal sports reporter began as a good living-room player, climbed the tournament ranks to an expert rating, and kept competing long after the book came out.

In the Scrabble variant Clabbers, what is permitted?

Anagrams of valid words are all Clabbers asks for, so MPORCTEU is a legal play because it rearranges COMPUTER; the name is itself an anagram of Scrabble.

In The Simpsons, which made-up word does Bart play to end a family game of Scrabble?

KWYJIBO is Bart's bluff in the 1990 episode Bart the Genius: pressed for a meaning, he says it is a big, dumb, balding North American ape with no chin, and Homer gives chase.

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

Scrabble Together sits on the back of the board: players team up to complete goal cards, with helper cards for hints, in a mode its maker aimed at anyone who finds word games intimidating.

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

Red marks the triple word squares, and the tripling stacks: a word laid across two of them counts nine times over.

Scrabble's inventor is said to have counted letters on the front page of which newspaper?

The New York Times front page is the one in the legend; a marked-up New York Herald Tribune page also survives, and he matched each letter's tile count to how often it appeared.

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

150 million sets is the tally its owners gave in 2008, for a game that every major manufacturer had turned down as unmarketable in the 1930s.

What may either Scrabble player do after six scoreless turns in a row?

End the game: after six scoreless turns in a row, such as passes and tile exchanges, either player may stop play, and each side then loses the value of the tiles left on its rack.

Under the standard North American Scrabble rule, what happens to a player who wrongly challenges a valid word?

They lose their next turn, the rule known as double challenge; because a wrong challenge is so costly, a player can risk laying down a made-up word and daring the opponent to object.

What penalty does a tournament Scrabble player take for running over the time limit?

10 points per minute, or part of a minute, is the price of overtime, so unlike chess, running out of time is not an automatic defeat.

Phil Appleby's 1,049-point Scrabble score in 1989, a Guinness record, came in what setting?

A friendly game, not a tournament, produced the 1,049 points against an opponent's 253, which is why the score sits in Guinness but not on the official club and tournament record lists.

What can a Scrabble player who tracks every tile work out once the bag is empty?

The opponent's rack: the rules let players keep a letter list and cross tiles off as they are played, so once nothing is left to draw, every letter still unseen must be in the other player's hand.

Scrabble's inventor liked to say that which relative was the better player and beat him at his own game?

His wife, Nina, once one of his schoolteachers, was the stronger player and the tester for each new version; he admitted she beat him at his own game.

In which 1968 horror film does a young woman use Scrabble tiles to unscramble a sinister neighbour's real name?

Rosemary's Baby has its heroine shuffle the tiles after a cryptic deathbed message, revealing that neighbour Roman Castevet is really Steven Marcato, son of a reputed Satanist.

Hasbro's licensed Star Trek edition of Scrabble awards bonus points for words played in which fictional language?

Klingon words earn extra points in Star Trek Scrabble even though they are spelled with ordinary English tiles; fans have also made unofficial sets printed with the language's own pIqaD symbols.

Which US state's name is a valid Scrabble word because it also means a structure on a steamboat?

Texas is playable in lower case as the name for the officers' quarters atop a riverboat: cabins were named after states, and the largest took the name of what was then the largest state.

Which American cable network televised the finals of the US National Scrabble Championship from 2004 to 2006?

ESPN and its sister channel ESPN2 aired the deciding games of an open event that attracts several hundred players every summer.

In 2024 the Scrabble star who once won the French world title without speaking French did so again in which language?

Spanish fell to him after about a year with the word list: he won 23 of 24 games in the classic format and logged the championship's first two perfect scores in the duplicate event.

Which everyday two-letter word, long barred from Scrabble, became playable in the official players' dictionary in 2018?

OK joined the lexicon in the sixth edition alongside EW, ZEN and EMOJI, part of a batch of some 300 additions.

A street sign in which New York City borough, once home to Scrabble's inventor, shows each letter with its tile value?

Queens honours the game at 35th Avenue and 81st Street in Jackson Heights, where the sign first went up in 1995 and was replaced in 2011 after the original vanished.

Which mobile game, launched in 2009 by the studio Newtoy, plays much like Scrabble on a rearranged board?

Words with Friends has no tie to the Scrabble brand, yet in 2012 its owner Zynga teamed up with Hasbro to sell physical board-game editions of the app.

Which letter, found on just one tile in an English Scrabble set, is the only one worth five points?

K is the lone five-pointer, one step above a cluster of four-point letters, and the tiles of a full set add up to 187 points.

Scrabulous, the unofficial Scrabble game that became a Facebook hit, was created by two brothers from which country?

India is home to Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Kolkata, brothers who built their free site because they wanted somewhere to play the game online.

Which vowel is the scarcest in an English Scrabble set, appearing on only four of the tiles?

U has half as many tiles as O, the next scarcest vowel, while A and I get nine apiece.

Which two letters in an English Scrabble set are worth eight points each, second only to the ten-point pair?

J and X each appear on a single tile, so a player lucky enough to draw one can double or triple those eight points on a premium square.

On the classic Scrabble board, which colour marks the 17 squares that double the score of an entire word?

Pink squares are the board's most common word premium, and a word stretched across two of them is doubled and then doubled again, a play known as a double-double.

Which capital city hosted the first World Scrabble Championship in 1991, won by a player representing the United States?

London staged the inaugural event with 48 players from around the world, and the deciding game of the final was settled by just four points.

Which former late-night talk show host took over The CW's Scrabble game show for its second season?

Craig Ferguson, the Scottish comedian who fronted The Late Late Show for nearly a decade, replaced the revival's first presenter, who stayed on as an executive producer.

Deluxe Scrabble sets mount the board on which device so that every player can face the letters upright?

A turntable lets the board spin towards whoever is playing, and deluxe sets pair it with a raised grid that stops the tiles sliding as it rotates.

Under Scrabble's standard rules, what happens to the value of the tiles a player is left with when play finishes?

Deducted from their score is the rule, and a player who goes out first also collects the value of everyone else's leftover tiles, so being stuck with a high-value letter can swing a close game.

In tournament Scrabble slang, what name is given to an invalid word played in the hope it goes unchallenged?

A phony stays on the board and scores in full unless the opponent challenges it, so a plausible-looking fake can be a deliberate bluff.

Super Scrabble's bigger board adds premium squares that multiply a letter or word score by how much?

Quadruple scores are the big prizes of the 2004 spin-off, with the quadruple word squares sitting in the four corners of a 21-by-21 grid.

Scrabble entered the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004 in the same class as the rocking horse and which action figure?

G.I. Joe won a trade magazine poll on which nominee most deserved the honour, and the trio entered a hall that had moved to The Strong museum in Rochester two years earlier.

Which publisher's name is on the Scrabble word list used at world championships and across most of the globe?

Collins lends its name to a list that historically held every North American tournament word plus many more drawn from the Chambers and Collins English dictionaries.

Mark Nyman, the first British World Scrabble Champion, spent twelve years producing which television game show?

Countdown, the letters-and-numbers quiz, had already crowned him its first Champion of Champions as a teenager in 1984, nine years before his world title.

Which board game, also sold under the Scrabble name, lets players stack tiles on top of letters already played?

Upwords scores a word by how many tiles it contains, stacked ones included, rather than by letter values, and no pile may rise more than five tiles high.

Which 2004 documentary follows four obsessive players on the road to the 2002 National Scrabble Championship?

Word Wars was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival and earned a documentary Emmy nomination; its subtitle promises tiles and tribulations on the circuit.

Joe Edley, the first three-time US National Scrabble Champion, memorised the dictionary while working which job?

Night security guard was a post he took for the free time it gave him, and he went on to win national titles in 1980, 1992 and 2000.

Tournament Scrabble games are timed with a two-faced clock first developed for which other board game?

Chess clocks have since spread to shogi, Go and nearly every competitive two-player board game; a Scrabble player starts the other side's clock after announcing a play's score.

Which Celtic language received its own edition of Scrabble in 2010, published by the group Glór na nGael?

Irish got its full set a year after the same organisation brought out a junior version of the game for younger players.

At the North American School Scrabble Championship, students in grades three to eight compete in which format?

In teams of two is the format, with pairs playing against digital timers and the title going to the pair with the most wins; third graders were first admitted in 2018.

Adam Logan, who won World Scrabble Championship titles twenty years apart in 2005 and 2025, has which profession?

Mathematician is his day job, with research in arithmetic and algebraic geometry, and he also holds a US national title from 1996.

Six drawings by Scrabble's inventor, an amateur artist, were acquired by which New York institution?

Metropolitan Museum of Art curators acquired six of his drawings, the work of a University of Pennsylvania graduate who lived to the age of 93.

Which British toy company won the rights to sell Scrabble in the United Kingdom in the mid-1950s?

Spear's Games grew from a family firm founded near Nuremberg in 1879 that opened its English factory at Enfield in 1932.

Older Scrabble sets in which language held 119 tiles and gave each player eight letters at a time?

German sets were later trimmed to 102 tiles and the standard seven-letter hand used by other editions.

Around 1953 a Johannesburg toy firm produced Scrabble in which language under the name Krabbel?

Afrikaans sets have no tiles for C, Q, X or Z, and Krabbel is simply the language's own rendering of the game's English name.

Which word did the public vote into the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary through an online contest in 2014?

GEOCACHE won the vote and entered the fifth edition alongside new two-letter words including DA, GI, PO and TE.

Before Scrabble had an official dictionary, US clubs and tournaments relied on which publisher's college dictionary?

Funk & Wagnalls proved unsatisfactory as tournament play grew, so the official list that replaced it pooled the words of five college dictionaries then in print.

In Scrabble board notation, which coordinate names the centre star square that the opening play must cover?

H8 is where column H, the eighth of fifteen, meets row 8, and a play is logged by its first square, so a five-letter opener ending on the star starts at 8D.

Which magician, later the star of Netflix's Magic for Humans, hosted the Scrabble Showdown game show on The Hub?

Justin Willman fronted the family quiz from 2011 to 2012 and has also presented Win, Lose or Draw for the Disney Channel.

Which computer opponent for Scrabble was created by the programmer Brian Sheppard?

Maven later met its match in Quackle, an open-source program of comparable strength built by a five-person team led by Jason Katz-Brown.

Scrabble's inventor was born in 1899 in which Hudson Valley city in New York State?

Poughkeepsie was where he attended the local high school, graduating in 1917, the son of a lawyer and a high school teacher.

The 1984 NBC game show Scrabble was co-produced by the company of which Australian television mogul?

Reg Grundy also made Sale of the Century, and his Scrabble swapped the board game's tile-laying for a contest of guessing words from punning clues.