Scrabble
It's from 1948, before you were born.
- Maker
- Selchow & Righter / Hasbro
- Type
- Board game (word)
- Debuted
- 1948
- Note
- Rejected by every major maker before it took off
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About
As of 2026, it's 78 years old.
Scrabble was the passion project of an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts, who calculated letter values by counting how often each appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Invented in the 1930s, repeatedly rejected by game companies, it finally launched under the Scrabble name in 1948 — and legend says it took off only after the president of Macy's played it on vacation and ordered a stockpile.
It became a household staple and a competitive sport with cutthroat tournaments where players memorize obscure two-letter words like 'qi' and 'za.' Nothing tests a friendship like someone laying down a triple-word-score 'JUKEBOX.'
Brainy, contentious, and built on newspaper math, Scrabble is the game that turned a jobless architect's letter-counting into the world's favorite vocabulary brawl.
