The History Of Scrabble

The original Scrabble board game was originally designed by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938. The birthplace of Scrabble was Jackson Heights, in Queens, New York. Named "Criss-Cross Words" by Butts, Scrabble was similar to the game he had previously created, "Lexico," with the main difference being that this new game was played with a game board. After limited success with sales, Butts sold the rights to the game to attorney James Brunot. After changing its name to Scrabble, increasing sales by distributing the game to New York City's Macy's Department Store, Brunot sold Scrabble's manufacturing rights to the Selchow and Righter game company. Other than changing its name and a few minor details in its appearance, Scrabble continues to be the same as when Butts designed it nearly seventy years ago.

In addition to the original, basic Scrabble, many variations have since been invented. Those available in the United States are manufactured by the Hasbro company, located in Rhode Island; J.W. Spear and Sons, based in England, distributes Scrabble throughout the rest of the world by way of the Mattel toy company.

Throughout the years, Scrabble has been developed in many different varieties to give anyone and everyone a chance to learn the game, participate, and compete. Scrabble Junior and My First Scrabble were created for the youngest players beginning to learn language skills Ensuring that every child have a Scrabble that he or she particularly enjoys, special styles were added for children, including Dora the Explorer, the Simpsons, and Disney editions.

Furthering Scrabble's reach toward everyone, the game is now also designed in a number of foreign languages, including Spanish, Dutch, French, Arabic, Russian, and Italian editions and even editions for languages which have diagraphs. There are also travel editions of Scrabble, deluxe editions, and large-print styles. These developments have made it so everyone everywhere can learn to play and enjoy this game.

Given the American public's widespread enjoyment of television, the next version of Scrabble was a televised game show. Airing for a total of more than six years, Scrabble was hosted by Chuck Woolery. Beginning in March, 1984, the show underwent a number of changes in format, rules, and prizes, some of which were more well-received than others. The Theme Week shows, specifically for teens, college students, and game show hosts, were of the most popular. One of the earlier formats, which required contestants to spell the Scrabble words, was not as well-liked.

With the growing popularity of the internet, and its availability spreading to more and more people, the online forms of Scrabble are much newer. Ian Stark, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, developed a proposal for creating an online server through which games of Scrabble could be played. Creating such a method required extensive background knowledge in Java, Javascript, SQL, PHP, HTML, algorithms, programming languages and web applications, among others-- showing that today's most modern form of Scrabble has come a long way since Alfred Mosher Butts designed his first cardboard letter tiles.