A Brief History of Scrabble - TIME
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`A BRIEF HISTORY OF
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`By M.J. Stephey
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`Sunday, Dec. 07, 2008
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`It's a "mockable emblem of Eisenhower-era family
`values, a stand-in for geekiness, a pasttime so
`decidely unhip that it's hip," former Wall Street
`Journal reporter Stefan Fatsis once wrote about the
`best-selling board game Scrabble, which turned 60
`on Tuesday. Fatsis would know: while researching
`Word Freak, his bestselling 2001 book about the
`game's most fanatical players, he became a self-
`proclaimed word freak himself, and he's not alone.
`More than 150 million Scrabble sets have been sold
`in 121 countries since its creation in 1931.
`
`Scrabble.
`
`Madonna and Martha Stewart love it, as do Barack
`Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Keanu Reeves and
`"Junk Bond King" Michael Milken, who organized a
`Scrabble tournament in the early 1990s at the white-collar prison where he
`was serving time for securities fraud. Even Queen Elizabeth II is a fan,
`perhaps in part because her first son was born the very same year that
`"Scrabble" became a trademark. (That coincidence did not go unnoticed in
`Britain. An artist commemorated the 60th birthday of Prince Charles and the
`board game by creating a portrait of the Prince entirely composed of Scrabble
`tiles.) In countries like Senegal, Scrabble is an official sport. In fact, when
`Senegal hosted the French Scrabble World championship this summer, its
`government commissioned a special Scrabble song to mark the occasion. (See
`the 50 best inventions of 2008.)
`
`Leon Neal / AFP / Getty
`
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`Scrabble was conceived during the Great Depression by an unemployed New
`York architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, who figured Americans could use a
`bit of distraction during the bleak economic times. After determining what he
`believed were the most enduring games in history — board games, numbers games like dice or cards and letter
`games like crossword puzzles — he combined all three. He then chose the frequency and the distribution of the tiles
`by counting letters on the pages of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening
`Post. For more than a decade he tweaked and tinkered with the rules while trying — and continually failing — to
`attract a corporate sponsor. The Patent Office rejected his application not once, but twice, and on top of that, he
`couldn't settle on a name. At first he simply called his creation "it" before switching to "Lexiko," then "Criss-Cross
`Words."
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`When a New Yorker named James Brunot contacted Butts about mass-producing the game, he readily handed the
`operation over. Brunot's contributions were significant: he came up with the iconic color scheme (pastel pink, baby-
`blue, indigo and bright red), devised the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles to make a word, and conceived the
`name "Scrabble." The first Scrabble factory was an abandoned schoolhouse in rural Connecticut, where Brunot and
`several gracious friends manufactured 12 games an hour. When the chairman of Macy's discovered the game on
`vacation and decided to stock his shelves with it, the game exploded. By 1952, Brunot's homegrown assembly line
`was churning out more than 2,000 sets a week. Nearly 4 million Scrabble sets were sold in 1954 alone.
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`In 1971, Brunot and Butts sold the game's rights to a company called Selchow & Righter. Butts received a total of
`$265,000 in royalties; Brunot got nearly $1.5 million. Coleco Industries Inc. took over after Selchow collapsed in
`the 1980s and when Coleco went bankrupt, Hasbro Inc. swooped in. In 1994, scandal rocked the Scrabblesphere
`when Hasbro announced plans to remove nearly 200 words deemed too offensive for the official Scrabble
`dictionary. The list of words ranged from ethnic slurs to playground phrases like "turd," "fart" and "fatso." Hasbro
`eventually compromised and published two officially sanctioned dictionaries — one for "recreational and school
`play" and the other for official tournaments and clubs; the latter contains a total of 120,302 words, dirty ones
`included.
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`Scrabble has been translated into 22 languages, from Arabic to Afrikaans. Oddly, the game is sold outside the U.S.
`by Hasbro's rival, Mattel Inc. By the early 1990s, thanks to its acquisitions of Milton Bradley (maker of Life, Yahtzee
`and Candy Land) and Parker Brothers (Monopoly, Risk and Trivial Pursuit), Hasbro owned more than half of the
`$1.1 billion U.S. games market. But in 1993, Mattel outbid Hasbro, paying $90 million for the international rights to
`the game. Hence the game's weirdly bifurcated homepage at Scrabble.com.
`
`The Scrabble soap opera went viral earlier this year when both Hasbro and Mattel filed lawsuits against two
`brothers from Calcutta for launching "Scrabulous," their own online version of the popular word game. Created in
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`A Brief History of Scrabble - TIME
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`http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1867007,00.html
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`and Rajat Agarwalla, had a quick and clever response to the accusations of copyright infringement. Their newly
`dubbed "WordScraper" now features a malleable board that, if one feels so inclined, can be rearranged to form the
`original Scrabble board.
`
`Even so, Facebook users were distraught, as evidenced by community groups like "Please God, I Have So Little:
`Don't Take Scrabulous Too." But last week, perhaps as an early birthday gift, Hasbro Inc. announced it had dropped
`its half of the lawsuits against the Agarwalla brothers. For players in the U.S. and Canada, at least, things are
`looking ... well, Scrabulous.
`
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