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The board game, Scrabble, was invented by New York architect and artist
Alfred Mosher Butts (1899-1993) in 1938. To date, one hundred fifty million games have been sold worldwide, and between one and two million sets are sold annually in the United States alone.
Butts initially named the game Criss Cross Words, but when entrepreneur
James Brunot (1902-1984)bought the rights to the game in 1948 he changed the name to Scrabble, a word meaning "to grope frantically", from the Dutch "Schrabben," to scrape or scratch. Brunot converted an abandoned school-house into the Scrabble factory.
For more information in addition to the above links, including information about Scrabble associations and tournaments, see the websites of
IdeaFinder.com,
North American Scrabble Players Association,
Anagrammer.com, and, of course, the
official Scrabble website.
