HISTORY OF SCRABBLE©
Scrabble© - subject of fiercely fought national tournaments in the UK, US, and Australia, arouser of vocabulist passion, and inspiration of literary comment. Who would have thought that it started out as the unpublished game called Lexico, the brainchild of an out-of-work Connecticut architect in the Depression year of 1931.
A study of the games market led Alfred Butts to pick on words as the basis of a new development. Lexico itself was not unlike its near-namesake Lexicon, in that the equipment consisted simply of tiles with letters, but no board. Following a procedure akin to Rummy, a fad card game of the time, the winner was the first to complete a seven-letter word and lay it face up on the table. For variety, Butts later accorded point-values to the letters, and when one player went out the others could subsequently score for making words of four or more letters. He offered it in this form to several manufacturers, but without success.
Architect Butts naturally went back to the drawing board, and duly came up with the idea of adding a board to the equipment and playing tiles to it in the manner of crosswords, which had then only recently become a craze. Now renamed ‘It’, the game was offered again to the manufacturers, and again turned down as being ‘too intellectual’, no doubt on the popular but conveniently unprovable business theory that ‘No one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the public’.
The new title may not have helped matters. ‘It’ had been coined by romantic writer Elinor Glyn in the previous decade as a synonym for sex, especially as embodied in silent film star Clara Bow. The game was evidently not as sexy as it sounded – which is perhaps ironic, in view of today’s use of ‘playing Scrabble©’ as a phrase rich in euphemistic suggestiveness.
In 1939 Butts was introduced by a mutual friend to James Brunot, who had been looking for a suitable business to develop away from the city lights and rat-race. Brunot liked the look of what was now called Criss-Cross Words, and started experimenting with it himself. War intervened to hold this up, and by 1942 Butts and his wife were making up game sets and marketing them through one Chester Ives, a bookshop owner in Danbury, Connecticut, who undertook the manufacture of the boards. This came to nothing, or nothing to write home about, and for a while it seemed as if Butts’s brainchild would remain forever the Peter Pan of the games world.
