60 Fun Facts About Scrabble

Which out-of-work American invented the game in the early 1930s in Poughkeepsie, New York?

He was an unemployed architect who decided every game was either a number game, a move game or a word game, and set out to blend the last kind with crossword puzzles.

Before the crossword-style board was added, the inventor's earlier tile game went by what name?

The tiles and their values were the same; the 15×15 board and crossword play came with the follow-up he called Criss-Crosswords.

In what year did James Brunot buy the rights to manufacture the game from its inventor?

Brunot paid a royalty on every set sold, and in 1949 his family hand-made 2,400 sets and still lost money.

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

Brunot also shuffled the premium squares slightly and simplified the rules, but left the letter distribution untouched.

Early orders from which department store helped the game take off around 1952?

Demand soon outran the converted Connecticut schoolhouse where the sets were made, and by 1954 nearly four million sets were sold.

In 1952, which Long Island game maker took over manufacturing after having earlier rejected the game?

Its president Harriet Righter had dismissed it as a nice little game that would sell well in bookstores; the firm bought the trademark outright in 1972.

Which company owns the rights to make Scrabble outside the United States and Canada?

It picked up the rights by acquiring J. W. Spear & Sons in 1994, which is why the game gets different editions on either side of the Atlantic.

Hasbro gained the North American rights in 1989 by buying the assets of which bankrupt company?

The same purchase brought Hasbro Parcheesi; Coleco had bought Selchow and Righter only three years earlier.

How many squares does the standard board contain?

The grid is 15 by 15, and 61 of those squares are premium squares of one kind or another.

How many triple word score squares are on the board?

They sit at the corners and the middle of each edge, which is why a word covering two of them scores nine times its face value.

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

Ninety-eight carry a letter and a value from 1 to 10; the two blanks are worth nothing but can stand in for any letter.

Which two letters carry the maximum value of 10 points?

J and X are worth 8 apiece and K is 5; the values were set by how rarely each letter appeared in newspaper text.

Which letter has the most tiles in the English set, with twelve?

A and I come next with nine each, and every one of those vowels is worth a single point.

Which letter did Scrabble's inventor limit to four tiles so pluralising would not make the game too easy?

Super Scrabble later loosened that restriction, giving players ten of them in its 200-tile set.

What is the combined point value of all the tiles in an English set?

The two blanks contribute nothing, so that total comes entirely from the 98 lettered tiles.

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

Experts routinely score three or more of these plays per game, and much of advanced strategy is about keeping a rack that can produce one.

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

Outside North America the English term is simply a bonus, and in Nigeria, where the game is hugely popular, it is often called a premium.

For the opening play, the star on the centre square doubles the value of what?

That is why an opening QUITE with the Q on a double letter and the E on the star is worth 48 points rather than 24.

When players draw from the bag to decide who goes first, what beats every letter?

Otherwise the tile closest to A wins the draw; the blank-beats-A clarification was written into the box rules in 1976.

Why are the original wooden tiles barred from tournament play?

Moulded plastic tiles are used instead, and games are played against a clock with a 10-point penalty for every minute of overtime.

Which word did Karl Khoshnaw play for a record 392 points in a 1982 Manchester tournament game?

The word, a plural of a West Indian tribal chief, stretched across two triple word squares for a nine-times multiplier plus the seven-tile bonus.

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

The carpenter's play remains the North American single-move record and was recognised by Guinness World Records.

How many points did Michael Cresta score in his 2006 record club game in Lexington, Massachusetts?

His opponent Wayne Yorra added 490, so the pair also set the record for the highest combined total in a game, 1,320.

Which seven-letter word yields the highest possible opening play, 128 points, without using a blank?

It is a plural of the Russian word for a peasant, and its 29 face-value points more than quadruple once the Z lands on a double letter and the bonus is added.

Which 15-letter drug name is the theoretical maximum play, spanning three triple word squares?

It is an anti-inflammatory once prescribed for arthritis, and the play needs eight tiles already on the board in exactly the right places, which has never happened in a real game.

Who won the first World Scrabble Championship, held in London in 1991?

The American had won the US national title two years earlier and, with nothing left to prove, largely quit competitive play to write baseball history.

The record five-time World Scrabble Champion, with titles from 2007 to 2019, represents which country?

He was introduced to the game by his mother at 28 because she was tired of him counting cards when they played 500.

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

He reportedly spent about nine weeks memorising the French word list, and in 2024 he repeated the trick by winning the Spanish-language world title.

The world's largest tournament, the Brand's Crossword Game King's Cup, is held annually in which country?

It takes place in Bangkok around the turn of June and July, and Thai player Panupol Sujjayakorn won the world championship in 2003.

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

He beat England's Lewis Mackay 4-0 in the final in Perth, Australia, at a championship organised by WESPA that year.

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

Early clubs had relied on the Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary, which allowed foreign words like OUI but lacked everyday words like COVEN.

The international word list was long called SOWPODS, an anagram of which two source list abbreviations?

The American and British lists were merged in the 1990s; Collins took over publishing the combined list in 2003, and it is now called Collins Scrabble Words.

The 2005 fourth edition of the OSPD added which pair of strategically prized two-letter words?

Both let a player dump a 10-point tile without a U; the 2014 edition added DA, GI, PO and TE, and 2018 finally admitted OK and EW.

The 2022 seventh edition of the OSPD admitted which word, previously kept out as a trademark?

The same update added around 500 words including YEEHAW, ZOOMER and BAE.

In 2021 the game's owner outside North America removed roughly how many derogatory terms from its word list?

The company's head of games asked what other game lets you score points with a racial epithet; NASPA had removed slurs from its own list after polling members in 2020.

Which organisation has sanctioned North American club and tournament Scrabble since 2009?

It cut ties with Hasbro entirely in 2021 and renamed its annual national event the Scrabble Players Championship.

National Scrabble Day is celebrated on the inventor's birthday, which falls on what date?

He was born in 1899 and died in 1993, nine days short of his 94th birthday.

In what year was Scrabble inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame?

It had been a finalist in the hall's inaugural 1999 class but missed out; the hall is housed at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York.

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

Its promos boasted that every man dies but not every man truly Scrabbles; a CW revival premiered in 2024.

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

It was built by brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Kolkata, and a Delhi court let them keep the game but not any similar-sounding name.

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

The new app's boosts and rewards prompted such protests that a stripped-down Classic mode was added within months.

In Words With Friends, using all seven tiles earns how many bonus points?

The rival app also uses 104 tiles and a different premium-square layout that allows combinations, such as a triple letter on a triple word, that Scrabble's board makes almost impossible.

A lawyer from which country invented Duplicate Scrabble around 1970?

Hippolyte Wouters organised the first French world championship in Cannes in 1972 with just eight players; a 1998 event in Vichy drew 1,485.

Under what name was the game introduced in Sweden in 1954?

Since the mid-1990s it has also been sold there as Scrabble, and the Alfapet name now belongs to a different crossword game.

Scarabeo, a home-grown variant played on a 17×17 grid, outsells the original in which country?

It has its own peculiar rules; Russia's version is called Erudit and the Hebrew edition is Shabets Na.

Welsh-language sets contain single tiles for what?

Because those pairs count as one letter in Welsh spelling, players are not allowed to build them from two separate tiles.

From 1979 to 1998, tiles for the North American market were made in a factory in which state?

At its peak the Fairfax plant turned out more than a million tiles a day; before 1979 they were imported from Germany.

Which Wall Street Journal sports reporter wrote Word Freak (2001), about competitive Scrabble?

While writing it he became an expert-rated tournament player himself; the 2004 documentary Word Wars features many of the same characters.

In the variant Clabbers, popular among tournament players, what is permitted?

So EEAIORT is fine because ETAERIO is a word; the name itself is an anagram of Scrabble.

In his 80s, the inventor released a second tile-based title in 1985, named what?

He described the 144-tile solo-style game as simultaneous solitaire; it never came close to matching his first hit.

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

It was billed as the first significant change to the board in more than 75 years and is aimed at anyone who finds word games intimidating; Hasbro said it had no plans to bring it to the US.

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

Hasbro switched to an orange-red-green-blue scheme in 2008, but tournament players still prefer the classic colours.

What was the profession of Alfred Mosher Butts, who invented the game in 1931?

He built it as a variation on his earlier word game Lexiko, using the same letter set and tile values.

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

The game was sold in 121 countries and more than 30 languages, with about half of British homes owning a set.

After how many consecutive scoreless turns may either player choose to end the game?

The other way a game ends is a player 'playing out' their rack with no tiles left in the bag, earning the value of opponents' unplayed tiles.

How many double word score squares, including the centre star, are on a standard board?

There are also 8 triple word, 12 triple letter and 24 double letter squares; Hasbro recoloured them in 2008 but tournaments kept the old scheme.

What penalty does a tournament player receive for going over the time control?

Unlike chess, running out of time is not an automatic defeat; all tournament games are two-player because luck matters more with three or four.

Phil Appleby's 1,049-point game, recognised by Guinness in 1989, was unusual in what way?

Such totals were often achieved under a now-unfashionable British 'high score rule' that counted only a player's own points.

For how many hours did Peter Finan and Neil Smith play in their 1984 duration record at St Anselm's College?

Guinness later stopped accepting such duration records, judging them too dangerous.

What is the name of the Scrabble computer opponent created by Brian Sheppard?

Quackle is an open-source rival of comparable strength, built by a team led by Jason Katz-Brown.