It’s National Scrabble Day.  And, nope, Scrabble was not invented, copyrighted, or maybe even played on this day.  However... today is the birthday of a guy named Alfred Mosher Butts.  And he’s the guy who invented Scrabble in 1931.  Butts, who had a daytime job as an architect, was born in 1899, and he cleared his final rack on April 4, 1993.  The first version of the game, called “Lexiko,” was played without a board.  Players would choose nine tiles out of 100, and then form words.  That evolved into “Crisscross” in 1938, making it more recognizable to the modern version, adding a board and tile rack.  In 1947 Butts sold the rights to the game to James Brunot, who made a few minor changes, including changing the name, which he copyrighted on December 1, 1948.  Today there is a North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) that determines which words are “legal” in the game.  Pretty much, any word in a standard dictionary that isn’t a proper noun or an abbreviation or hyphenated or requires an apostrophe, and is not derogatory, is considered “legal.”  And, yes, there is even a website that will tell you if a word can “legally” be played in Scrabble:  https://scrabblewordfinder.org/solver  And, no, Lexiko is not a “legal” word because it is a proper noun.

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