Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Happy 62nd birthday Scrabble!

Today is the birthday of the Scrabble inventor: An unemployed architect from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Alfred Mosher Butts, invented the game in 1931, which was a hard sell to game manufacturers at first.

Originally, he called it 'Lexico' and in 1938, he renamed the game to 'Criss Crosswords'.

Entrepreneur James Brunot loved the game, the pair worked out the kinks and the board game was born in 1948 and trademarked that year. In 1949, the Scrabble game was released to the public. Today commemorates the birthday of inventor Butts (April 13, 1899 to April 4, 1993).

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works (e.g. The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) provide a list of permissible words. The Collins Scrabble checker can also be used to check if a word is allowed.

(Source: Wikipedia, wiki.answers.com, news.yahoo.com; photo credit: blackberryempire.com)

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