My Uncle

“My proudest moment as a child was the time I beat my Uncle Pierre at Scrabble with the seven-letter word FARTING.” (Tina Fey)

Scrabble is a word game that uses letter tiles to create words in an attempt to reach the highest score.  It was created by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938. Scrabble was derived from his earlier game Lexiko. Butts tried to sell the game himself by manufacturing sets under the name Criss-Crosswords. In 1948, James Brunot bought the rights to the game, with an agreement to pay a royalty to Alfred Mosher Butts. Brunot changed the name of the game to Scrabble. In 1952 Jack Straus, Macy's president, played the game and placed an order.

James Brunot couldn't keep up with the order, and sold the rights to Selchow and Righter. They sold over four million games in the second year. Scrabble is one the biggest selling and most popular board games of all time. Scrabble is over eighty years-old today. It is popular among both old and young game players. Here are facts you may not have known about Scrabble:

·        The box rules of Scrabble have been changed four times in 1953, 1976, 1989, and again in 1999.

·        There is also a Scrabble version produced in Braille for those unable to see.

·        Scrabble can be found in 31 different languages and in at least 121 countries around the world.

·        It is estimated that in each hour of the day there are at least 30,000 games of Scrabble started.

·        Some people play Scrabble by mail and by email.

·        In the United States version of Scrabble, the Scrabble dictionary does not allow any offensive words.

·        In the French version players all play each move with the same number of letters. They call it Duplicate Scrabble.

·        The game is sold in 121 countries and comes in 31 different languages.

·        Over 150 million copies of Scrabble have been sold worldwide.

·        Scrabble has quite a celebrity following, those celebs who play include: Sting, Keanu Reeves, Moby, John Travolta, Carol Burnett, Jimmy Kimmel, Kylie Minogue, Mel Gibson, Joan Collins, Tom Cruise, Kate Hudson, Richard Nixon, Madonna, Sharon Stone, and Queen Elizabeth II.

·        If all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were lined up, they would stretch for more than 50,000 miles.

·        It’s possible to score 1782 points on a single word. That word is Oxyphenbutazone. To get those points, competition player Benjamin Woo played it across the top of the board; hitting three Triple Word Score squares whilst also making seven crosswords downwards.

·        English Scrabble has 100 tiles. The most tiles are in Italian and Portuguese Scrabble which both have 120 tiles.

·        In 1985, Lieutenant Commander Waghorn and Lance Corporal Gill played Scrabble for five continuous days. Not by choice as they were both trapped in a crevasse in Antarctica.

·        There are 124 playable two-letter words in the English (language) game, containing every letter in the alphabet except for V.

·        Scrabble is used all over the world as a means of teaching English.

·        The name Scrabble comes from the words Scrabbling, Scrabbled and Scrabbles – all of which means to claw or scrape at something frantically. These words all derive from the Dutch word   ‘Schrabbelan’, which most likely integrated into American diction from Dutch settlers to North America.

·        One variation of the Scrabble rules that people play is called ‘Clabbers’. This is an anagram of Scrabble, in which players play their words in any order they want to and play the letters in any order so long as the letters can make an anagram of a word.

·        In Great Britain, 53% of all homes own a copy of Scrabble, and in the United States about 33% of all homes own a set.

·        In the French Scrabble there are five 10-point tiles, these being; K, W, X, Y and Z.

·        Scrabble is ranked as the second best board game in U.S. History, second only to Monopoly.

·        There is a daily newspaper column in Thailand devoted solely to Scrabble.

·        Scrabble became an American daytime game-show, hosted by Chuck Woolery on NBC, which ran from July 1984 to March 1990. The show got a revival from January to June in 1993.

·        In 2004, Scrabble was finally inducted into the American National Toy Hall of Fame, joining other great toys and games such as Monopoly, Etch A Sketch, Lego and The Game Boy.

“Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.” (Craig Brown)[i]

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[i] Sources used:

·        “30 Fun Facts about Scrabble” by The Fact Site

·        “Scrabble Facts” by SoftSchools.com