Scrabble

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players place letter tiles drawn at random onto a fifteen by fifteen board to build interlocking words, scoring points from each letter's own value and from bonus squares on the board. It was designed in the 1930s by the American architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who worked out the letter distribution and point values by analyzing letter frequency on the front page of the New York Times, first under the names Lexiko and then Criss Cross Words. Butts's own attempts to sell the game to established manufacturers were rejected. In 1948 a friend and entrepreneur, James Brunot, bought the rights, simplified the rules, renamed the game Scrabble and began small scale production; sales took off after 1952, reportedly following word that the president of Macy's own department store had played it on vacation and ordered it stocked in his stores.