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 making them slightly smaller than the squares on the board. Only the rosewood tiles of the deluxe edition varies the width up to for different letters. Travelling versions of the game often have smaller tiles (e.g. ); sometimes they are magnetic to keep them in place. The capital letter is printed in black at the centre of the tile face and the letter's point value printed in a smaller font at the bottom right corner. S is one of the most valuable tiles in English-language Scrabble because it can be appended to many words to pluralize them (or in the