In 1931, New York, Alfred Mosher Butts lost his job as an architect. He decided to create a game that was a combination of both skill and luck, the result was Lexico. This was a game that was based on letter frequency and scoring was based on the word length with additional scores for the harder to use letters.

Over the years, Alfred Butts derived other games loosely based on the same principles as Lexico, until, in 1938 he created Criss-Crosswords which featured a 15x15 square board and a 7-tile rack.

However it wasn't until after the Second World War in 1948 that the modern game of Scrabble® was born, with a little help from James Brunot who rearranged the premium squares and simplified the rules. Copyright was granted on the 1st December 1948, and the trademark was registered on the 16th of that month.

Scrabble® is over 50 years old, has been sold in over 120 countries worldwide, in 29 different languages and sold over 100 million sets. This makes Scrabble® the world's best selling word game.