Scrabble have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world. The game is played by two to four players on a square board with a 15×15 grid of cells (individually known as "squares"), each of which accommodates a single letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is between two players or, occasionally, between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack. The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple-word"
Scrabble CH in the "Collins Scrabble Words" lexicon. In 1938, American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called "Lexiko". The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including "The New York Times". The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.