Ask for It by Name!

The real mystery about the invention of Scrabble is why Frank Capra didn’t turn it into a movie.

Fade in on a Queens, NY walkup apartment in the depths of the 1930s Depression. Alfred Mosher Butts, architect, has lost his job at a time when new jobs are impossible to find. Desperate to make ends meet, Alfred Butts decides to invent a game. A methodical man, Butts does his homework first and spends hours analyzing existing games. He finds that they fell into three main categories: move games (chess, checkers, etc.), number games (dice, bingo), and word games like anagrams. Butts decides his best bet is to combine an element of chance, as in dice, with an exercise of skill and knowledge, as in word games.

For the next few months, Alfred Butts studies The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post, keeping painstaking statistics on the frequency with which each letter in the alphabet appears. Armed with his analysis, Butts creates a game he calls “Lexico,” a hybrid of anagrams and a crossword puzzle, using small plywood letter tiles and little racks made of baseboard molding. He sells Lexico himself for $1.50 and approaches all the major game companies, hoping to find a distributor to boost Lexico into the national market. They all turn him down.

But Alfred Butts perseveres, adds a playing board to his game, and renames it “Criss-Cross Words.” Unfortunately, he has created another flop, or so it seems. By now it is 1947 and Butts meets a man named James Brunot, who buys the rights to his game in exchange for royalties on units sold. Brunot fiddles with the game a bit and decides to rename it “Scrabble,” a word meaning “to scramble, scratch at hurriedly, to write quickly or scribble,” derived from the Dutch “schrabbelen” meaning “to scratch.”

And now it’s Brunot’s turn to face a flop. Scrabble is limping along, selling 2,400 sets in 1949 and losing money. Until, that is, the Chairman of Macy’s plays the game while on vacation and orders all his stores to carry it. Bang, zoom. Orders out the wazoo, coming in faster than they could make them, by 1954 they’re selling more than 3.8 million Scrabble sets a year. America goes Scrabble crazy, and never really stops.

Today there’s a Scrabble set in one out of every three US homes and Scrabble, now owned by Hasbro Inc., is an American icon. And Alfred Butts, no longer “scrabbling” to make a living, lives to age 93, playing his beloved Scrabble right up to the end.