When was scrabble first

Please be aware that your use of such third party's linked website is subject to their privacy policy and terms of use, which may differ from those of Hasbro. There were many victims of America's Great Depression in But in an out of work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts invented a game that would lift the spirits of millions. Hailing from Poughkeepsie, New York, Butts had taken to analyzing popular games, defining three different categories: number games, such as dice and bingo; move games, such as chess and checkers; and word games, such as anagrams.

He also noted, " Attempting to combine the thrill of chance and skill, Butts entwined the elements of anagrams and the classic crossword puzzle into a scoring word game first called LEXIKO. Legend has it Butts studied the front page of "The New York Times" to make his calculations for the letter distribution in the game. This skilled, cryptographic analysis of our language formed the basis of the original tile distribution, which has remained constant through almost three generations and billions of games.

Nevertheless, established game manufacturers unanimously slammed the door on Butts' invention. It was only when Butts met James Brunot, a game-loving entrepreneur, that the concept became a commercial reality. Together they refined the rules and design and then, most importantly, came up with the name SCRABBLE - a word defined as 'to grasp, collect, or hold on to something'; and a word that truly captured the essence of this remarkable concept.

Pushing on, the Brunots rented a small, red, abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut. Along with some friends, they turned out 12 games an hour, stamping letters on wooden tiles one at a time. Only later were boards, boxes, and tiles made elsewhere and sent to the factory for assembly and shipping. In fact, the first four years were a struggle. Then in the early s, legend has it, that the president of MACY'S discovered the game while on vacation and ordered some for his store.

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.

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 point bonus for using all seven tiles to make a word, and conceived the name "Scrabble.

When the chairman of Macy's discovered the game on vacation and decided to stock his shelves with it, the game exploded. By , Brunot's homegrown assembly line was churning out more than 2, sets a week. Nearly 4 million Scrabble sets were sold in alone. Coleco Industries Inc. In , scandal rocked the Scrabblesphere when Hasbro announced plans to remove nearly 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. Scrabble has been translated into 22 languages, from Arabic to Afrikaans. Oddly, the game is sold outside the U. Hence the game's weirdly bifurcated homepage at Scrabble. 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 to waste time and wage distant linguistic battles, Scrabulous eventually became the most popular application on Facebook, attracting more than , players each day to the social-networking site.