SCRABBLE

Scrabble is a word game in which two or four players score points by placing tiles, each
bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15x15 grid of squares. The tiles must
form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns, and be
included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
The name Scrabble is a trademark of Mattel in most of the world, except in the United
States and Canada, where it is a trademark of Hasbro. 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 and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are
approximately 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.

INFORMATION
The game is played by two to four players on a square game board imprinted with a
15×15 grid of cells (individually known as "squares"), each of which accommodates a single
letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is between two players or, occasionally,
between two teams, each of which collaborates on a single rack.
The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points
awarded: eight dark red "triple-word" squares, 17 pale red "double-word" squares, of which one,
the center square (H8), is marked with a star or other symbol, 12 dark blue "triple-letter" squares,
and 24 pale blue "double-letter" squares. In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium
squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL, but the original premium
square color scheme is still preferred for Scrabble boards used in tournaments.
The name of the game spelled out in game tiles from the English-language version. Each
tile is marked with their point value, with a blank tile—the game's equivalent of a wild card—
played as the word's first letter. The blank tile is worth zero points.
In an English-language set, the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a
letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points for each lettered tile is based
on the letter's frequency in standard English, commonly used letters such as vowels are worth
one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game
also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used
as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed. Other language
sets use different letter set distributions with different point values.
Tiles are usually made of wood or plastic and are 19 by 19 millimetres (0.75 in × 0.75 in)
square and 4 mm (0.16 in) thick, making them slightly smaller than the squares on the board.
Only the rosewood tiles of the deluxe edition vary in width up to 2 mm (0.08 in) for different
letters. Travelling versions of the game often have smaller tiles (e.g. 13 mm × 13 mm (0.51 in ×
0.51 in)), sometimes they are magnetic to keep them in place. The capital letter is printed in
black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value printed in a smaller font at the
bottom right corner. Most modern replacement tile sets come at 18 mm × 20 mm (0.7 in × 0.8
in).
S is one of the most versatile tiles in English-language Scrabble because it can be
appended to many words to pluralize them (or in the case of most verbs, convert them to the
third person singular present tense, as in the word PLUMMETS), Alfred Butts included only four
S tiles to avoid making the game "too easy". Q is considered the most troublesome letter, as
almost all words with it also contain U; a similar problem occurs in other languages like French,
Dutch, Italian, and German. J is also difficult to play due to its low frequency and a scarcity of
words having it at the end.C and V may be troublesome in the endgame, since no two-letter
words with them exist, except for CH in the Collins Scrabble Words lexicon.

HISTORY
Alfred Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various length, using
examples in a dictionary, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and The
New York Times. This was used to determine the number and scores of tiles in the game.
In 1938, 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. Although he left most of the game (including the
distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the "premium" squares of the board
and simplified the rules; he also renamed the game Scrabble, a real word which means "to
scratch frantically”. In 1949, 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
[Link] to legend, Scrabble's big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of
Macy's, played the game on vacation. 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”.
In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long
Island-based Selchow and Righter, one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and
Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the game. Harriet T. Righter licensed the
game from entrepreneur James Brunot in 1952. "It's a nice little game. It will sell well in
bookstores", she remembered saying about Scrabble when she first saw [Link] its second year as a
Selchow and Righter product, 1954, nearly four million sets were sold.
 Selchow and Righter bought the trademark to the game in [Link] Spear (now a
subsidiary of Mattel) began selling the game in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. In
1986, Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco, which soon afterward went bankrupt. Hasbro
purchased the company's assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi.
In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC. The Scrabble game
show ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993. The
show was hosted by Chuck Woolery. Its tagline in promotional broadcasts was, "Every man dies;
not every man truly Scrabbles.” In 2011, a new TV variation of Scrabble, called Scrabble
Showdown, aired on The Hub cable channel, which is a joint venture of Discovery
Communications, Inc. and Hasbro.
Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004.

RULES
The "box rules" included in each copy of the North American edition have been edited
four times: in 1953, 1976, 1989, and 1999.
The major changes in 1953 were as follows:
 It was made clear that:
 words could be played through single letters already on the board.
 a player could play a word parallel and immediately adjacent to an existing word
provided all crossing words formed were valid.
 the effect of two premium squares were to be compounded multiplicatively.
 The previously unspecified penalty for having one's play successfully challenged was
stated: withdrawal of tiles and loss of turn.
The major changes in 1976 were as follows:
 It was made clear that the blank tile beats an A when drawing to see who goes first.
 A player could pass their turn, doing nothing.
 A loss-of-turn penalty was added for challenging an acceptable play.
 If final scores are tied, the player whose score was highest before adjusting for unplayed
tiles is the winner: in tournament play, a tie is counted as half a win for both players.
The editorial changes made in 1989 did not affect gameplay.
The major changes in 1999 were as follows:
 It was made clear that:
 a tile can be shifted or replaced until the play has been scored.
 a challenge applies to all the words made in the given play.
 Playing all seven tiles is officially called a "bingo" in North America and a "bonus"
elsewhere.
 A change in the wording of the rules could have been interpreted as meaning that a player
may form more than one word on one row on a single turn.