“Every word’s a winner.” – slogan of Scrabble.
- Scrabble is a 2 to 4 player game revolving around words, requiring orthographic, strategy and probability skills.
- ‘Scrabble’, meaning to ‘scratch’, ‘scramble’ or ‘struggle’, is played by placing tiles to make interconnecting words, in a way that scores points, left to right or downwards, on a board.
- Since 1999, Scrabble has been produced by Hasbro Inc, in the United States and Canada, and it is manufactured by Mattel in all other countries.
- Scrabble is sold in many countries and languages, 121 and 29 respectively, but the game cannot be played in Chinese or Japanese.
- The square tiles used in Scrabble are typically made of wood or plastic, and are 0.4 cm (0.16 in) high and 1.9 centimetres (0.75 inches) square,
- In 1938, Alfred Mosher Butts, an architect and artist from New York in the United States, invented Scrabble, originally known as ‘Lexico’ and then ‘Criss-Crosswords’, but the game did not start becoming popular until the 1950s.
- Scrabble typically contains 100 tiles in the English version, and the words accepted in the game are generally those found in standard dictionaries or word game dictionaries.
- Major tournaments for Scrabble include the World Championships, National Championships and the Brand’s Crossword Game King’s Cup.
- There are many variations of the game Scrabble, that can be played, including online or digital versions that can be played by two players or one player.
- It is estimated that 150 million Scrabble sets have been sold in the world, since its invention.
Bibliography:
Scrabble, 2014, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble
Scrabble History, n.d, Hasbro Gaming, http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/discover/history.cfm
