Scrabble Trivia
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This Scrabble trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers and covers the whole game, from the out-of-work architect who tallied letter frequencies from a newspaper front page to the 2024 double-sided board. There are questions on the board and the tiles (how many squares, which letters score 10, why there are only four S tiles), the rules (the centre star, the seven-tile bonus, who goes first), record plays like CAZIQUES, QUIXOTRY and the mythical OXYPHENBUTAZONE, the world championships and the New Zealander who won the French title without speaking French, and the long-running arguments over which words belong in the official dictionaries. It suits family game night, pub quiz rounds, club players who think they know the history, and anyone who has ever argued over whether QI is a word. The easy questions are answerable by anyone who has opened a box; the hard ones ask what the game was called in Sweden and which state made a million tiles a day. Every answer has been checked against a reliable source, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which out-of-work American invented Scrabble during the Great Depression?
Alfred Butts
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.
Q 02Before he added a crossword-style board, Scrabble's inventor gave his earlier tile game what name?
Lexiko
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.
Q 03James Brunot bought Scrabble's rights in 1948 for what?
A royalty per set
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.
Q 04James Brunot renamed the game Scrabble, a real English word that means what?
To scratch frantically
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.
Q 05Which department store's 1952 order turned Scrabble from a slow seller into a national craze?
Macy's
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.
Q 06In 1952, which Long Island game maker took over Scrabble production, having earlier rejected the game?
Selchow and Righter
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.
Q 07Which company owns the rights to make Scrabble outside the United States and Canada?
Mattel
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.
Q 08Hasbro gained Scrabble's North American rights in 1989 by buying the assets of which bankrupt company?
Coleco
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.
Q 09How many squares does a standard Scrabble board contain?
225
225 squares make up the 15-by-15 board, which is why no Scrabble play can be longer than 15 letters.
Q 10Where do a Scrabble board's triple word squares sit?
The outer edge
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.
Q 11How many tiles, including blanks, are in an English-language Scrabble set?
100
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.
Q 12Which two Scrabble letters carry the top value of 10 points?
Q and Z
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.
Q 13Which letter has the most tiles in an English Scrabble set, with twelve?
E
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.
Q 21Michael Cresta scored 365 points with which single Scrabble play in his record 2006 club game?
QUIXOTRY
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.
Q 22Which seven-letter word gives Scrabble's highest possible opening play, 128 points, without using a blank?
MUZJIKS
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.
Q 23Which 15-letter drug name anchors Scrabble's highest-scoring theoretical play, across three triple word squares?
OXYPHENBUTAZONE
Q 14Scrabble's inventor was out of work in which profession when he devised the game?
Architect
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.
Q 15Playing all seven tiles in one Scrabble turn earns how many bonus points?
50
50 points is the bonus, and it often outweighs the tiles themselves: a seven-letter word whose tiles add up to 20 scores 70.
Q 16North Americans call a seven-tile play a bingo; what is it called in French?
Un scrabble
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.
Q 17The star on the centre square of a Scrabble board doubles the value of what on the opening play?
The whole word
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.
Q 18When Scrabble players draw tiles to decide who goes first, which draw is best?
A blank tile
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.
Q 19Why are Scrabble's original wooden tiles barred from tournament play?
Blanks can be felt in the bag
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.
Q 20Which word for Caribbean chiefs did Karl Khoshnaw play for a record 392 points in Manchester in 1982?
CAZIQUES
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.
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.
Q 24Peter Morris, winner of the first World Scrabble Championship in 1991, later became an award-winning historian of which sport?
Baseball
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.
Q 25The Scrabble world champion of 2007, 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019 represents which country?
New Zealand
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.
Q 26In 2015, who won the French-language World Scrabble Championship despite not speaking French?
Nigel Richards
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.
Q 27The Scrabble tournament long known as the King's Cup, often called the world's biggest, is held in which country?
Thailand
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.
Q 28In 2015 Wellington Jighere became the first world champion from Africa, representing which country?
Nigeria
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.
Q 29Which publisher produces the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, first issued in 1978?
Merriam-Webster
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.
Q 30Scrabble's international word list was long called SOWPODS, an anagram of which two source lists' abbreviations?
OSPD and OSW
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.