3.09 p.m. ET (2009 GMT) November 19, 1999
Fox News
By Lisa Meyer
NEW YORK - They call it the "Ah ha!" experience.
"It comes from creating something out of nothing," said Kathy Hummel, media and production director at the National Scrabble Association. "You stick your hand in a bag and pull out seven random letters and build words."
In an entertainment age dominated by fast nteractive images, why has this simple experience endured?
"Because any two people can get together and play Scrabble," answered Jim Geary, 32, a computer programmer who competed in the 1999 World Scrabble Championship in Australia. "It has an ease of play that is head-and-shoulders above other activities."
The only equipment needed is your mind and a bunch of letters, a flat surface and a little light. Of course, the board is also required. In the United States and Canada, Hasbro, Inc. owns the trademark. Everywhere else, Mattel owns it.
"People play in basements, churches, barns and Barnes and Noble," said Hummel. "It's a human experience. A tactile experience. You touch the wooden letters and you lay them down on the board. As fast as we are moving ahead in the technological world, more people in their personal lives are trying to slow down."
But the popularity of Scrabble is anything but slowing down. Between one and two million sets are sold each year in North America. One hundred million sets have been sold worldwide. The National Scrabble Association estimates that 33 million people play the 50-year-old game in the United States and Canada. Among those are 10,000 enthusiasts who belong to the association.
Many of them are members of the 200 sanctioned Scrabble clubs. Each year about 150 Scrabble tournaments are held throughout the United States and Canada. These tournaments attract players at all levels: from curious novices to experts. The winner of the 1999 World Scrabble competition, Joel Wapnick, a 53-year-old music professor at McGill University in Montreal, took home $15,000.
"One participant sold his car to pay for his way to the conference [held in Australia]," said John Williams, the executive director of the National Scrabble Association. "Some were underwritten. Others traveled half way around the world to get there."
The National Scrabble Association even has a program to help teachers build their students' vocabulary, math, spatial-relationship, decision-making and cooperative learning skills. According to the association, a half a million students in more than 15,000 U.S. classrooms are playing Scrabble.
This is a far cry from Scrabble's beginnings. Alfred Mosher Butts, an unemployed architect from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., couldn't sell his idea to established game manufacturers. Analyzing games, he found they fell into three categories: number games, such as dice and bingo; move games, such as chess and checkers; and word games, such as anagrams.
Wanting to create a game that would use both chance and skill, Butts combined features of anagrams and the crossword puzzle. First called Lexiko, the game was later called Criss Cross Words. To decide on a letter distribution, Butts calculated the letter frequency on the front page of The New York Times.
In the depths of the Depression, Butts and entrepreneur James Brunot rented an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Conn., and turned out 12 games an hour, stamping letters on wooden tiles.
In 1949, Brunot made 2,400 sets and lost $450. Then in the early 1950s, as legend has it, the president of Macy's discovered the game on vacation and ordered some for his store. Within a year, demand was higher than supply and Scrabble games had to be rationed to stores. Recently, Hasbro began selling Scrabble on CD Roms.
Miltz. Khud. Yex. Vatu. Zoeal. These are just a few of the words that finalists used in the 1999 World Scrabble Championship in Australia.
"But most players don't even know the meanings of the words they create," said Hummel. They just memorize the spellings.
The official Scrabble players' dictionary has only abbreviated definitions of its 120,000 words. The national association has four requirements for a word to be included in the dictionary. It has to be a main entry in a standard dictionary and a part of speech. The word can't be punctuated or foreign.
Most who call the National Scrabble Association are in the middle of a game. "They want to check on the rules," said Hummel. "Or they ask us to look up a word."
Scrabble players often speak of words in terms of numbers. It is good to know all the sevens and eights, they say. The best weapons, however, are twos and threes.
"But the game uses more strategic thinking than just knowing the words," said Geary. "Once you find the words, they are just options. You have to use strategy to play the right move."
In fact, most Scrabble champions are not journalists or English professors, but computer scientists or engineers. "The game requires as much mathematical skills as linguistic," said Hummel. "The players have to look at the board and see several moves ahead, anticipating how words will connect."
Last Modified 2/7/00