National Scrabble Day

Alfred Mosher Butts was an unemployed New York architect in 1931 when he began tinkering with a word game that combined anagrams with crosswords. His big insight was tile frequency, which letters should be common and which rare. He studied the front page of The New York Times, counting letter frequencies, and used the data to set Scrabble's tile distribution. (There are exactly as many E tiles as there are Es on a typical NYT page.) He called it "Lexiko," then "Criss-Cross Words," then "It," then (after partnering with entrepreneur James Brunot) "Scrabble."

It flopped initially. Butts and Brunot made 2,400 sets by hand between 1948 and 1952 and sold them slowly through gift shops. Then in 1952, Jack Strauss, then-chairman of Macy's department store, played Scrabble on vacation, loved it, and ordered it for his stores. The game took off overnight. By 1953, Brunot couldn't keep up with demand. He licensed the game to Selchow & Righter, who sold millions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1971, Selchow & Righter had sold their entire company's non-Scrabble inventory to focus just on the game.

Today, over 150 million Scrabble sets have been sold worldwide, in 29 languages. The official dictionary, the Scrabble Players Dictionary contains over 200,000 playable words, including notorious ones like QI (life force), ZA (slang for pizza), AA (lava), and JNANA (Hindu knowledge). The World Scrabble Championship has been held since 1991. Top American players include Nigel Richards (5-time champion) and Mack Meller.

National Scrabble Day is Alfred Butts's birthday, April 13, 1899. Butts died in 1993 at age 93, having played Scrabble his entire adult life. His story is the most American kind: invented a game during hard times, got rejected for 15 years, became an institution. Play a game today. Butts would approve.

Four principles that separate beginners from serious players:

Six of the most useful, learn these six and your scores will jump immediately: