Crazy Facts About Scrabble – Made Right Here on Long Island

From the 1950s through the early ’70s, SCRABBLE, the world’s most famous word game was manufactured in Bay Shore. That’s right, before it became a global obsession, Scrabble had a stopover in Suffolk County. Here are some crazy facts about Scrabble, its quirky inventor, and its Long Island legacy.

Scrabble Was Born in the Depression, Not in a Boardroom

• The game was invented in 1931 by Alfred Mosher Butts, a jobless architect living in Jackson Heights, Queens
• He was born on April 13, 1899, which is why we celebrate National Scrabble Day on that date
• Originally called “Criss Cross Words”, the game combined crossword puzzles with anagrams
• Butts calculated letter values and tile distribution using the front page of The New York Times
• He realized vowels flooded the English language, leading to 12 E’s, 9 A’s, 8 O’s, but just 1 Q, Z, J, K, and X
• He made the first sets by hand and sold them for $1.50 each
• His wife, who regularly beat him at the game, once scored 234 points for the word “quixotic”
• Butts struggled for nearly 20 years to find a game company willing to produce it
• In his other life, he was an artist—six of his works are part of the MoMA collection
• He died in 1993 at the age of 93

Scrabble Gets Its Name and a Shot at the Big Time

• In 1948, Butts handed over production rights to his friend James Brunot, who renamed it Scrabble
• “Scrabble” means “to grope frantically”—perfect for game night tile searches
• Brunot started manufacturing the game in a small plant in Newtown, Connecticut
• In 1949, Brunot made 2,400 games and lost money doing it
• By 1952, the game retailed for $3
• Butts earned about three cents in royalties per set. He once said: “One-third went to taxes. I gave one-third away. And the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life.”
• Scrabble got its big break when a Macy’s executive played it on vacation and convinced the department store to carry it
• Orders surged, and Brunot couldn’t keep up. He turned to Selchow & Righter to scale production

Long Island Enters the Game

• Selchow & Righter, a game company founded in 1867, agreed to manufacture Scrabble starting in 1952
• Their headquarters and production plant were located in Bay Shore
• The company had previously passed on the game but changed its mind once it saw sales take off
• By the 1970s, Scrabble accounted for 40% of their business
• In 1971, they purchased all rights to the game from Brunot
• In 1973, they moved operations to a facility near MacArthur Airport in Holbrook, but continued using the Bay Shore plant as a warehouse
• In 1986, Selchow & Righter was sold to Coleco Industries
• Coleco went bankrupt in 1989, and Hasbro bought Scrabble soon after

Long Island’s Local Scrabble Champion

• John D. Williams Jr. of Greenport became one of the game’s leading advocates
• He helped create NASPA (North American Scrabble Players Association) and wrote several books, including Everything Scrabble
• He once worked on Selchow & Righter’s in-house Scrabble newsletter while it was based in Bay Shore
• After the company shut down, Williams continued promoting the game from his home and later a small office nearby

Scrabble’s Stats and Trivia

• The game is estimated to be in one out of every three American homes
• Over 150 million sets have been sold globally
• Scrabble is played in 121 countries and translated into 29 languages
• Between one and two million sets are sold each year in North America
• When a player uses all seven tiles in one move, it’s called a “bingo”
• The Scrabble World Championship debuted in London
• As of 2022, the reigning world champion is Nigel Richards of New Zealand, widely regarded as the greatest competitive Scrabble player of all time
• In 2004, Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame

The Digital Scrabble Era

• In 2005, a fan-made online version called Scrabulous launched, becoming wildly popular on Facebook by 2007
• Hasbro sued the creators, leading to a renamed version: Lexulous
• In 2009, the Scrabble-inspired game Words With Friends was launched by Newtoy (later Zynga)
• Words With Friends is not officially connected to Scrabble, but it became the most downloaded mobile game in the U.S. by 2017

Scrabble Clubs Still Alive on Long Island

• Long Islanders continue to play in casual Scrabble clubs that meet in Starbucks, Panera, Barnes & Noble, and other coffee shop corners
• Organized tournaments are still held across the country under NASPA’s banner
• The national championship prize is $10,000

So next time someone plays “QUIZZIFY” on a triple word score and wipes the board, remember: the modern game that now spans continents and smartphone screens once had humble beginnings—crafted by hand in Queens and mass-produced in Bay Shore. And that’s a Long Island triple-word fact.