Recently I wrote a piece about the popularity explosion of crossword puzzles early in the last century. Why, then, did it take two more decades for someone to create a board game about words, and then another two decades before that game finally caught on? Let’s take a look at the game of Scrabble.
It all started during the Great Depression — 1933 to be exact — when Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect in Poughkeepsie, New York, decided to try his hand at creating a word game that could help take people’s minds off their troubles for a little while. Once he’d overcome the problem of creating a scoring system for his new game, it was off and running. Right?
Well, not exactly. Butts shopped his game, which he called Lexico (the Greek word for “words”) around to all the game companies of the day, with no luck. Changing its name to Criss Cross Words didn’t help. He eventually met entrepreneur James Brunot, who suggested changing the name again, this time to Scrabble, which meant “to grasp, collect, or hold on to something.” With that, the game was off and running. Right?
Nope, not yet. Butts and Brunot had set up shop in an old schoolhouse where they churned out their game, but it didn’t become profitable until it caught the eye of the president of Macy’s department store in the early 1950s, and then it was off and running. Really.
Ownership of Scrabble has changed a few times, and since 1989 the game’s North American version has been owned by Hasbro, the owners of Milton Bradley; Mattel owns the game’s rights everywhere else.
And while the two versions of the game are pretty similar, the same can’t be said for their preferred dictionaries. Since 1976, members of the North American Scrabble Association — the serious players of the Hasbro version — have used Merriam-Webster’s “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” during sanctioned events. Mattel relies on a guide published by Collins. The latest edition of the OSPD, which is updated once or twice a decade and contains more than 100,000 words, was published in 2014.
Updated lists of acceptable Scrabble words come out more regularly than new editions of the dictionary, however.
Somewhat surprisingly, two-letter words are “highly regarded” by competitive Scrabble players because they give them a way to connect a longer word to one that’s already been played. One small word that’s included in the 2014 edition of the dictionary is “te,” a variant of the musical note “ti,” which has been described as “a hardworking little gem.” Other small words in that edition are da, gi and po.
The updated 2018 list included: aa, ka, za, OK and ew. Also on the list were: yowza, bizjet, qwerty and qapik (a monetary unit in Azerbaijan), along with 17 words that begin with “q” but don’t need a “u.”
“We are now incorporating more of what you might call transcribed speech,” said Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski. “Sounds like ‘ew’ or ‘mm-hmm,’ or other things like ‘coulda’ and ‘kinda.'”
But if you want to score really big, go with “quinzhee (a shelter made by hollowing out a pile of snow), using an existing letter, across the top of the board, ending in the upper right corner. The payoff for making the word and using all your letters is 401 points. Now that’s a score to hold on to.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
Send questions/comments to the editors.
