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The Surprising Story Behind Scrabble’s Invention

The world’s most famous word game, Scrabble, was born out of creativity, research, and persistence. It all started in the 1930s with Alfred Mosher Butts. Alfred was an American architect who loved words and puzzles. His curiosity birthed scrabble.

During the Great Depression, Butts carefully studied the frequency of letters in the English language by analyzing the front page of The New York Times. This research became the foundation for Scrabble’s unique letter values and tile distribution, a system that remains unchanged today.

His early version of the game was called “Lexiko”, later redesigned into a board game known as “Criss-Crosswords.” Even though toy companies rejected it, Butts didn’t give up.

In 1948, James Brunot joined forces with him. Brunot simplified the game, renamed it “Scrabble,” and started hand-making sets. The real breakthrough came when Macy’s department store discovered the game in the early 1950s, and scrabble took off like wildfire.

Today, Scrabble is played in over 120 countries and in 29 languages or more, proving that a simple idea can become a global classic. 

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