This Scrabble trivia quiz has 60 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which out-of-work American invented the game in the early 1930s in Poughkeepsie, New York?
Alfred Butts
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.
Q 02Before the crossword-style board was added, the inventor's earlier tile game went by what name?
Lexiko
The tiles and their values were the same; the 15×15 board and crossword play came with the follow-up he called Criss-Crosswords.
Q 03In what year did James Brunot buy the rights to manufacture the game from its inventor?
1948
Brunot paid a royalty on every set sold, and in 1949 his family hand-made 2,400 sets and still lost money.
Q 04James Brunot renamed the game Scrabble, a real English word that means what?
To scratch frantically
Brunot also shuffled the premium squares slightly and simplified the rules, but left the letter distribution untouched.
Q 05Early orders from which department store helped the game take off around 1952?
Macy's
Demand soon outran the converted Connecticut schoolhouse where the sets were made, and by 1954 nearly four million sets were sold.
Q 06In 1952, which Long Island game maker took over manufacturing after having earlier rejected the game?
Selchow and Righter
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.
Q 07Which company owns the rights to make Scrabble outside the United States and Canada?
Mattel
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.
Q 08Hasbro gained the North American rights in 1989 by buying the assets of which bankrupt company?
Coleco
The same purchase brought Hasbro Parcheesi; Coleco had bought Selchow and Righter only three years earlier.
Q 09How many squares does the standard board contain?
225
The grid is 15 by 15, and 61 of those squares are premium squares of one kind or another.
Q 10How many triple word score squares are on the board?
8
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.
Q 11How many tiles, including blanks, are in an English-language set?
100
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.
Q 12Which two letters carry the maximum value of 10 points?
Q and Z
J and X are worth 8 apiece and K is 5; the values were set by how rarely each letter appeared in newspaper text.
Q 13Which letter has the most tiles in the English set, with twelve?
E
A and I come next with nine each, and every one of those vowels is worth a single point.
Q 14Which letter did Scrabble's inventor limit to four tiles so pluralising would not make the game too easy?
Q 21Which word did Karl Khoshnaw play for a record 392 points in a 1982 Manchester tournament game?
CAZIQUES
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.
Q 22Michael Cresta scored 365 points with which single play in his record 2006 club game?
QUIXOTRY
The carpenter's play remains the North American single-move record and was recognised by Guinness World Records.
Q 23How many points did Michael Cresta score in his 2006 record club game in Lexington, Massachusetts?
830
His opponent Wayne Yorra added 490, so the pair also set the record for the highest combined total in a game, 1,320.
S
Super Scrabble later loosened that restriction, giving players ten of them in its 200-tile set.
Q 15What is the combined point value of all the tiles in an English set?
187
The two blanks contribute nothing, so that total comes entirely from the 98 lettered tiles.
Q 16Playing all seven tiles in one turn earns how many bonus points?
50
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.
Q 17North Americans call a seven-tile play a bingo; what is it called in French?
Un scrabble
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.
Q 18For the opening play, the star on the centre square doubles the value of what?
The whole word
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.
Q 19When players draw from the bag to decide who goes first, what beats every letter?
A blank tile
Otherwise the tile closest to A wins the draw; the blank-beats-A clarification was written into the box rules in 1976.
Q 20Why are the original wooden tiles barred from tournament play?
Players can feel which ones are blank
Moulded plastic tiles are used instead, and games are played against a clock with a 10-point penalty for every minute of overtime.
Q 24Which seven-letter word yields the highest possible opening play, 128 points, without using a blank?
MUZJIKS
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.
Q 25Which 15-letter drug name is the theoretical maximum play, spanning three triple word squares?
OXYPHENBUTAZONE
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.
Q 26Who won the first World Scrabble Championship, held in London in 1991?
Peter Morris
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.
Q 27The record five-time World Scrabble Champion, with titles from 2007 to 2019, represents which country?
New Zealand
He was introduced to the game by his mother at 28 because she was tired of him counting cards when they played 500.
Q 28In 2015, who won the French-language World Scrabble Championship despite not speaking French?
Nigel Richards
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.
Q 29The world's largest tournament, the Brand's Crossword Game King's Cup, is held annually in which country?
Thailand
It takes place in Bangkok around the turn of June and July, and Thai player Panupol Sujjayakorn won the world championship in 2003.
Q 30In 2015 Wellington Jighere became the first world champion from Africa, representing which country?
Nigeria
He beat England's Lewis Mackay 4-0 in the final in Perth, Australia, at a championship organised by WESPA that year.