Scrabble at 70: How an out-of-work architect devised the phenomenally popular word game

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Elaborating on an earlier version he had trialled known as “Lexiko”, Butts carried out a frequency analysis of letters by tabulating which words recurred most frequently in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post, enabling him to determine the right value to assign to each letter of the alphabet according to rarity. open image in gallery Scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts at the game’s factory in Fairfax, Vermont, in 1985 In 1935, the housing market picked up and he returned to his old job with Holden, largely abandoning Criss-Cross Words beyond selling a handful of units between 1938 and 1942. Sales rocketed from 4,853 copies in 1951 to 3.79m in 1954. open image in gallery From origins in adversity, Scrabble has steadily become an international phenomenon The family soon found they could not keep up with demand and sold the game on to Selchow & Righter, who were among those to have rejected the opportunity presented by Alfred Butts before the war. Theoretically, the highest-scoring word in the game is “oxyphenbutazone”, denoting a type of anti-inflammatory drug used to treat arthritis and bursitis, which could garner the player 1,778 points if played just so.