Scrabble!

When it is said that true money is in knowledge, maybe they were referring to this game!

In that you must know the word OXYPHENBUTAZONE! This is the word which would theoretically fetch you the highest points!

Am sure the clever ones would have got the game which literally means Scratch frantically!

For the other majority like me; the game is SCRABBLE! Did you know that the points have been given after careful study and frequency analysis!?

Also by the way, the game not only had a predecessor, it was also a big flop (or at least not a major success!) when it was released! In fact it was not even called SCRABBLE!

So the story goes way back in 1931 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented, called Lexiko!

The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times!

The new game, which he called Criss-Crosswords, added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style gameplay. He manufactured a few sets himself but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day!

In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold!

Brunot also slightly rearranged the “premium” squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also renamed the game Scrabble, a real word that means “scratch frantically”!

Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year but lost money!


Finally when a big man, Jack Straus, the president of Macy’s, played the game on vacation, the big change happened!

Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order, and within a year, “everyone had to have one!

Of course it was later a major success so much that it was even turned into a TV show!

The highest theoretical highest-scoring Scrabble word out there is OXYPHENBUTAZONE. Ohioan Dan Stock found the word, which is worth a wild 1,458 points. And if a player was able to add some specific hooked words to the theoretical board, they could score up to 1,778 points!

As of 2008, the game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American homes and half of British homes have a Scrabble set!

One of the games which entertains and teaches at the same time! Teach and teacher reminds me of the inspiring tale of Padma award winner Meenakshi Amma Gurukkal who is an Indian martial artist known as a practitioner and teacher of Kalaripayattu!

Read about her to get inspired!

SHubh Ratri!