The board game where you accumulate points by creating words on a grid was created on April 13, 1948 in the United States. Each year, 1.5 million copies are sold worldwide. We have selected ten scrabble anecdotes (to shine in the evening).
What do former US President Barack Obama, singer Taylor Swift and French footballer Hugo Lloris have in common? They are all Scrabble fans. Proof that this word game, which celebrates its 75th anniversary on Thursday April 13, is still just as popular. In tabletop or digital version on computer or smartphone application, did you know that 30,000 games are played every hour in the world? Here are 10 special Scrabble “riddles” concocted from data provided by Hasbro.
>>> Scrabble bans words deemed offensive, players wonder about this ban
1 Highest scoring word is medicine
Do you dream of making a big splash at Scrabble? To impress your friends or family? Try placing the word Oxyphenbutazone on the grid. It is indeed the sequence of letters, authorized in the game, allowing to obtain the highest score. Placed in the right place, Oxyphenbutazone can earn 1,458 points. It is an anti-inflammatory taken off the market in the mid-1980s.
The current record is held by Kurdish Karl Khoshnow. In 1982, this expert scrabbler, now deceased, obtained 392 points by placing the word caziques, ie “chief” in the plural.
2 The latest edited version is Ukrainian
Scrabble is produced in 28 different languages and Ukrainian is the latest introduced. Among them is a Braille version for blind and visually impaired people. It is not possible to play with a Chinese or Japanese version but speakers of these languages can play in English with a rulebook in their own language.
3 Scrabble wasn’t originally called Scrabble
The inventor of Scrabble, the American Alfred Mosher Butts, first named his game “Lexiko”. It was then renamed “Criss-Crosswords”, “It” and “Alph” (in reference to the name of its creator) before taking its final name in 1948. The generic word Scrabble comes from the Dutch “schrabbelan” which means “to scratch ” or “scratch”.
4 Parties take place on the International Space Station
Do you know how astronauts on the International Space Station manage to play Scrabble despite being weightless? Using a tray and letters attached to their backs with a Velcro system. In the extreme conditions category, a game of underwater Scrabble was also played in 1995 at the University of Portsmouth (England) for the benefit of a charity association. Scrabblers had used special laminated tiles and trays to which lead weights were attached.
5 A New Zealander Scrabble champion… in French
On July 20, 2015, in Louvain, Belgium, Nigel Richards, a 48-year-old New Zealander, won the French-speaking classic Scrabble world championships after a three-hour final. His particuliarity ? This bespectacled bearded man doesn’t speak French… And has a very good memory! In just two months, the English speaker has memorized the Official Scrabble, nearly 60,000 words and more than 300,000 variations. Nigel Richards is far from being a beginner since he is also a four-time English-speaking Scrabble world champion.
6 A million lost tiles
They travel to the four corners of the world, sometimes very far from their set. Almost a million Scrabble tiles are missing. If we put them on top of each other, they would reach the height of about 12 Empire State Building.
And if all the Scrabble tiles ever produced were placed end to end, they would circle the earth eight times.
7 The G Tile Scandal
At the 2011 World Scrabble Championships in Warsaw, Chollapat Itthi-Aree, a 25-year-old player from Thailand, accused Ed Martin, a 35-year-old Englishman, of hiding a G tile. strip search of Martin in the toilet. But the request was rejected and the latter won the game by one point. According to the British daily The Sunit’s about “biggest scandal to hit the event since one player accused another of eating a tile”.
8 Play Scrabble or go to the bathroom… You have to choose
In 1995, a British Scrabble player brought a complaint against the organization of which he was a member, the Association of British Scrabble. His grievance? He felt that the association did not give him enough time to go to the bathroom between games.
9 You can play 25 games at the same time
This is the record held by the Malaysian Ganesh Asirvatham. For two and a half hours, on November 7, 2007, he faced 25 competitors simultaneously during the Scrabble World Championship. He won “only” 21.
10 Most of it opposed military
Last but not least… The biggest (in size) game in Scrabble history was played in 1998, at Wembley Stadium (UK) to mark the game’s 50th anniversary. The British Army and the Royal Navy clashed using 2.5 meter side tiles. The victory of the Royal Navy is listed in the Guinness World Records.