The Words of Scrabble

N 1931, DURING THE MIDST of the Great Depression, an unemployed architect named Alfred M. Butts created a game he called Lexico (see Benjamin 1981, from which this brief history has been compiled). It was a simple game, requiring only luck, a good vocabulary, and a certain amount of tactical skill as its players arranged small wooden tiles in crosswordpuzzle fashion to make words. Initially, Butts intended Lexico to be a diversion for his family alone, but they enjoyed it so much that he soon made several replicas and began retailing them at a neighborhood store for $1.50 each. Over the next five years, Lexico enjoyed a very limited success-a success that did not improve greatly when Butts changed Lexico's name to Criss Cross Words in 1936. Soon after that, however, Butts metJames Bronot, an enterprising New York businessman who suggested changing the name of the game to Scrabble and finding better ways to market it.' Fortunately for Butts, he took both of Bronot's suggestions, and the rest, as they say, is history: the game was eventually sold to the Selchow and Righter company in 1949, and today Scrabble is the largestselling board game in the United States, outselling even Monopoly by an estimated twenty percent. Every Eden has its serpent, however, and the world of Scrabble was no exception. Put simply, its players frequently disagreed as to what constituted a word (for example, were words heard on the street or read in a novel acceptable, or did they have to derive from some more authoritative source?), and although such squabbles did not threaten the stability of the families in which the game was played, they assumed considerably more importance as various Scrabble tournaments and contests began to appear. The most frequent course of action taken-and the one recommended by the rules of the game-was to check a standard dictionary, but this led only to further complications. Because no two dictionaries contain exactly the same words (not to mention derivatives and spelling variations), which one was to be used as the ultimate means ofjudgment? In response to this problem, in 1978 Selchow and Righter published

Linguistics · Natural language processing · Computer Science · Lexicography and Language Studies · Philosophy

• The Taxonomy of Word Making

  John Algeo•WORD•1978

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