He placed a large order, and within a year, "everyone had to have one". Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. According to legend, Scrabble 's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. They made 2,400 sets that year but lost money. : 100 In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, a section of Newtown. Although he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the "premium" squares of the board and simplified the rules he also renamed the game Scrabble, a real word which means "to scratch frantically". In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold. He manufactured a few sets himself but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day. The new game, which he called Criss-Crosswords, added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style gameplay. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times. In 1938, the American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented, called Lexiko. This was used to determine the number and scores of tiles in the game. History Alfred Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various length, using examples in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New York Times. C and V may be troublesome in the endgame, since no two-letter words with them exist, except for CH in the Collins Scrabble Words lexicon. J is also difficult to play due to its low frequency and a scarcity of words having it at the end. Q is considered the most troublesome letter, as almost all words with it also contain U a similar problem occurs in other languages like French, Dutch, Italian, and German. S is one of the most versatile tiles in English-language Scrabble because it can be appended to many words to pluralize them (or in the case of most verbs, convert them to the third person singular present tense, as in the word PLUMMETS) Alfred Butts included only four S tiles to avoid making the game "too easy". Most modern replacement tile sets come at 18 mm × 20 mm (0.7 in × 0.8 in). The capital letter is printed in black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value is printed in a smaller font at the bottom right corner. 13 mm × 13 mm (0.51 in × 0.51 in)) sometimes they are magnetic to keep them in place. Travelling versions of the game often have smaller tiles (e.g. Only the rosewood tiles of the deluxe edition vary in width up to 2 mm (0.08 in) for different letters. Tiles are usually made of wood or plastic and are 19 by 19 millimetres (0.75 in × 0.75 in) square and 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, making them slightly smaller than the squares on the board. There are approximately 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world. As of 2008, the game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. Mattel owns the rights to manufacture Scrabble outside the U.S. Scrabble is produced in the United States and Canada by Hasbro, under the brands of both of its subsidiaries, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.Īmerican architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game in 1938. Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. Vocabulary, spelling, anagramming, strategy, counting, bluffing, probability A game of English-language Scrabble in progress
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