On December 1, 1948, a very famous board game was copyright registered: Scrabble.

However, as we know the day an invention is registered is not necessarily the day it was invented. In 1938, architect Alfred Butts created a game which he originally called “criss-crosswords”. It was played on a 15×15 grid game board with a crossword layout. Butts manually tabulated the frequency of letters in words using examples from dictionaries and various newspapers like the New York Times.


In 1948, James Brunot bought the right to manufacture the game and paid a royalty fee to Butts. He left the rules of the game practically unchanged and called it “scrabble”. This new name comes from a real world which means “to scratch frantically”. The big breakthrough came in 1952, when the president of Macy’s placed a big order and put it in his stores. Today, the manufacturing rights of U.S. and Canada belong to Hasbro, whereas Mattel provides the rest of the world with this famous game.


For those of you that might not know the game, the main goal is to collect points. Commonly used letters like A and E have lower values than less used letters like Y or Z. And of course there are tournaments and world records in the Scrabble world. The 2011 Scrabble World Championship took place in October this year in Warsaw, Poland, and was won by Nigel Richards of Australia, becoming the first ever two time Scrabble World Champion.

For this and many other reasons December has always been a great month in trademark history.