Celebrating National Scrabble Day

April 13th is National Scrabble Day, so get together with a bunch of friends and hold a Scrabble tournament your apartment or in the Community Room at 501 on First. Today in our post, we will give you a rundown on the game and some tips for playing too, but first the basics.

You can read the full History of Scrabble here, but in a nutshell, ”Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie, New York, decided to invent a board game. 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. Attempting to create a game that would use both chance and skill, Butts combined features of anagrams and the crossword puzzle.”

Scrabble is played by two to four players on a square board; using lettered tiles, players create words crossword-puzzle style. The Scrabble board is marked with premium squares where point values are doubled and tripled. A dictionary is chosen beforehand to arbitrate challenges to words spelled.

Some Interesting Facts About Scrabble:

• The game was initially called LEXIKO,and later on the name was changed to CRISS CROSS WORDS. In 1948 the name was changed to SCRABBLE, which is a real word that means “to grope frantically.”

• Over one-hundred million sets of Scrabble have been sold worldwide. Between one and two million are sold in the United States alone.

• The official dictionary allows over 120,000 words that may be used in playing Scrabble..

• Scrabble is found in one of every three American homes.

• Scrabble is available in various formats, including Junior, Standard, Deluxe, Travel, Spanish, and French editions.

• Every year, a National SCRABBLE® Championship is held in a major US city. In addition, the National SCRABBLE® Association sanctions over 180 tournaments and more than 200 clubs in the US and Canada.