In 1938, American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called “Lexiko”. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times. The new game which he called “Criss-Crosswords”, added the ISXIS game board and the crosswords-style game play.

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles bearing a single letter onto a board divided into 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns, and be included in a standard dictionary or Lexicon.