English-language Scrabble Japan. English-language Scrabble English-language Scrabble is the original version of the popular word-based board game invented in 1938 by US architect Alfred Mosher Butts who based the game on the letter distribution in "The New York Times" in English. The Scrabble variant most popular in English is standard match play, where two players compete over a series of games. Duplicate Scrabble is not popular in English, and High score Scrabble is no longer practised. Although English is a worldwide language, the official list of allowable words and some tournament rules change between territories. The main Scrabble associations in North America
Scrabble letter distributions are included here as they are sometimes used in borrowed words. Blanks do not exist in this game. German-language editions of Scrabble contain 102 letter tiles, in the following distribution: Before the current 102-tile set, German language sets had 119 tiles. With the larger sized tile pool, players had eight tiles at a time on their racks, as opposed to the standard seven. The letter distribution for this larger set is: German sets marketed as Foreign Language Editions produced by Selchow and Righter had 100 tiles with the following distribution: Before the Foreign Language Editions produced by Selchow and Righter