The History of Scrabble: From Depression-Era Invention to Global Phenomenon

From a Jobless Architect to the World’s Favorite Word Game

Scrabble is played in 121 countries, has been produced in 29 languages, and more than 150 million sets have been sold worldwide. But this cultural institution almost didn’t happen. The game was rejected by every major game manufacturer for over a decade before a chance encounter at a department store changed everything.

The Depression-Era Origins (1931-1938)

Alfred Mosher Butts was an out-of-work architect during the Great Depression when he decided to create a board game. An avid game player, Butts analyzed existing games and concluded that the market was dominated by three types: number games (like dice), move games (like chess), and word games (like anagrams). He wanted to create something that combined the vocabulary skill of crosswords with the luck element of dice — a game that rewarded knowledge but where anyone could win on a good draw.

Butts spent years calculating letter frequencies by hand, analyzing the front page of The New York Times to determine how often each letter appeared in English. His painstaking frequency analysis directly determined how many of each tile to include and what point values to assign. The fact that E has 12 tiles worth 1 point while Q has 1 tile worth 10 points is the direct result of Butts counting letters in newspaper articles in his apartment during the 1930s.

His first version, called “Lexiko,” was a hand-made game without a board — players simply drew tiles and formed words. When he added a crossword-style board, he renamed it “Criss-Crosswords.” Butts submitted the game to Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and every other game manufacturer he could find. They all rejected it.

James Brunot and the Birth of “Scrabble” (1948-1952)

In 1948, James Brunot, a retired government worker, bought the rights to manufacture the game from Butts. Brunot simplified the rules, rearranged the premium squares on the board, and crucially renamed the game “Scrabble” — a real word meaning “to scratch or claw frantically.” He and his wife began hand-producing sets in their home in Dodgington, Connecticut.

For the first few years, Brunot lost money. In 1949, he made 2,400 sets and lost $450. The game sold modestly through word of mouth — people who played it loved it, but it had no national distribution or marketing.

Then, according to the widely told story, Jack Straus — the president of Macy’s department store — played Scrabble while on vacation in 1952. He loved it so much that he ordered sets for Macy’s. When customers saw the game in a major department store, demand exploded. Brunot couldn’t keep up. Within two years, he licensed production to Selchow and Righter, and Scrabble became a national phenomenon.

The Golden Age of Scrabble (1953-1990)

By 1954, nearly four million sets had been sold. Scrabble became a fixture of American households alongside Monopoly and chess. The game crossed the Atlantic to Britain, where it became equally popular, and eventually spread to dozens of countries and languages.

Competitive Scrabble emerged in the 1970s. The first official Scrabble tournament was held in 1973, and the National Scrabble Association was founded in 1978. The competitive scene revealed that Scrabble, beneath its family-game exterior, contained extraordinary strategic depth — board control, tile tracking, probability calculation, and of course, an absurdly vast vocabulary.

The game’s ownership passed through several hands: Selchow and Righter sold to Coleco in 1986, which went bankrupt in 1989, and Hasbro acquired the North American rights. In most of the rest of the world, Scrabble is owned by Mattel. This split ownership means that tournament rules, official dictionaries, and even the game’s appearance differ between continents.

The Digital Revolution and Competitive Scene (1990-Present)

The internet transformed Scrabble in two ways. First, online play (starting with the Internet Scrabble Club in 1998 and later Words With Friends in 2009 and Scrabble GO) made it possible to play anytime against anyone in the world. Second, computer analysis revealed optimal strategies that human players had never considered, raising the competitive standard dramatically.

The World Scrabble Championship, first held in 1991, showcases the game’s remarkable depth. Top players memorize the entire official dictionary (over 187,000 words in TWL, 267,000 in SOWPODS), study probability distributions for tile draws, and practice board-reading skills that rival chess grandmasters in complexity.

Words With Friends, released in 2009, introduced Scrabble-style gameplay to hundreds of millions of mobile users who had never owned a physical Scrabble set. While the rules differ from official Scrabble, WWF’s massive popularity renewed interest in competitive word games and brought a new generation of players into the hobby.

Scrabble Today: A Game for Everyone

In 2026, Scrabble exists simultaneously as a casual family game, a serious competitive pursuit, and a digital entertainment platform. School Scrabble programs operate in thousands of schools across North America, teaching vocabulary and critical thinking. The competitive circuit includes national championships in dozens of countries, culminating in the biennial World Scrabble Championship.

The game Alfred Butts created in his Depression-era apartment — by counting letters in newspapers and making tiles from plywood — has become one of the most enduring and beloved games in human history. And the letter distribution he calculated by hand in the 1930s? It’s still used in every English-language Scrabble set produced today, nearly a century later.

Ready to make your own Scrabble history? Start with our Word Unscrambler to build your vocabulary, study our Scrabble Strategy Guide, and learn the 107 essential two-letter words that every serious player needs to know.