The Complete History of Scrabble — From 1938 to Today

Scrabble was invented during the Great Depression by Alfred Mosher Butts, an architect who had lost his job and turned to game design. What started as a hand-made board game produced in a New York apartment became one of the best-selling games in history.

Alfred Butts and the First Version

Butts created the game in 1938, originally calling it "Criss-Crosswords." He analyzed the frequency of letters appearing in the New York Times to determine how many tiles of each letter to include and their point values. This frequency analysis is why E (12 tiles, 1 point each) and S (4 tiles, 1 point each) are common, while Q and Z (1 tile, 10 points each) are rare.

James Brunot and Commercial Production

In 1948, James Brunot licensed the game from Butts and renamed it "Scrabble." Brunot and his wife produced the games by hand in their living room, losing money for years. The turning point came in 1952 when the president of Macy's discovered the game while on vacation and ordered a large supply. Sales exploded from 8,000 units in 1950 to 4 million in 1954.

Global Expansion

Scrabble is now produced in 29 languages and sold in over 120 countries. Arabic and Hebrew versions require entirely different tile distributions. Chinese Scrabble uses character tiles. The North American word list and the international word list diverge significantly, with tournament players using different dictionaries depending on their region.