Scrabble wasn’t always a family game-night staple. It began in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when Alfred Butts, an out-of-work architect, decided to invent a new pastime. Combining elements of chance, strategy, and vocabulary, he meticulously calculated letter values based on their frequency in newspapers. The result? A word game he initially called Lexiko, later rebranded as Criss-Cross Words.

Butts’ creation didn’t take off immediately. It wasn’t until the 1940s, when entrepreneur James Brunot saw potential in the game, that things changed. Brunot refined the rules, renamed it Scrabble, and began hand-producing sets in his garage. By the 1950s, Scrabble had skyrocketed in popularity, especially after the president of Macy’s discovered it and declared it a must-have.

Today, Scrabble has become a beloved classic, played in countless languages and connecting word enthusiasts across the globe.