Scrabble is the ultimate word game for those who love words and competition.
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Believe it or not, this popular game was created by an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts. He came up with the idea for this game during The Great Depression after analyzing popular games. He believed the only thing that kept word games from being as widely played as all of the popular games was the lack of a way to keep score.
He created the game Lexico, which soon became known as Criss Cross Words. But game manufacturers were not impressed. It wasn’t until Butts met James Brunot, an entrepreneur who loved games, that things began to happen. They changed the design and redid the rules, but I think the most important thing they did was change the name to Scrabble, a word that means to grasp, collect, or hold on to something.
Scrabble was trademarked in 1948. The game—at first all of them were handmade—was not an instant success. Even though the game steadily grew in popularity, they actually lost money. Then, according to legend, the president of Macy’s discovered the game, loved it, and ordered some for his store. Within a year, Scrabble was a game that everyone had to have. That was the beginning of this games’ success.
Scrabble or other versions of this popular game can now be played on your computer, over the internet, and on your cell phone. The version I play on my cell phone is Classic Words Free.
My husband is addicted to this game too. Your opponent is Droid, and he is a challenge to beat, especially when you play the extremely hard level. Droid loves to make seven-letter words, sometimes two and three in a row. Each time a seven-letter word is made, the player who makes it earns an extra fifty points.
Now for the reason I wrote this article: words and the way they are spelled. We all know that a weasel is a cunning, sneaky person. The adjective form is weaselly. My hubby was playing a game of Classic Words Free and really needed (and wanted) the spelling to be weasily. But even though weaselly wasn’t spelled the way he hoped it would be, he still won the game.
Amazon Links:
Winning Moves Tile Lock Scrabble
Hasbro Scrabble Deluxe Edition (Amazon Exclusive)
The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
Writing Prompts
So I began to wonder if Scrabble was created during a time and in a place where the spelling of words could be molded or changed to fit on the board, what would life be like? The positive outcome from this would be that it would be easier to win a Scrabble game. Or would it? Your opponent could also change the spelling of words. And if you could change the spelling of words for a Scrabble game, where else would you be able to change the spelling of them? And if you could change the way words were spelled, could you also change their meanings?
What if each of us humans were a letter in a Scrabble game? Would we always be the same letter? Or would we be rewarded for certain acts and be upgraded? Maybe instead of being an “A” we could be a “Z”?
When I used to play Scrabble with my mom and brother, we always used to try and change the way certain words were spelled to make them fit on the board and score more points, but of course, the dictionary stopped us from succeeding in doing that. But what if there were no dictionary and words were just spelled the way a person thought they sounded?
In Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie, a murder is committed during a game of bridge, and the murderer has to be one of the people that was in the room. Why not write a story where a murder takes place during a game of Scrabble?
