Alfred Mosher Butts of Jackson Heights was an unemployed architect when he set out to invent a word game in 1938. Studying the prevalence of letters in printed works and newspapers, Butts devised his first iteration of the game that followed the same letter distribution as Scrabble, but used no board. He devised the game in his Jackson Heights apartment and tested it with community members in the basement of the Community United Methodist Church on 35th Avenue in Jackson Heights.

He originally named his game Lexiko before a rejected patent revealed a second name, Criss-Cross Words. In 1947, Butts's business partner, James Brunot, officially renamed the game to the word meaning "to grasp or grope." After trial and error, Butts eventually developed the game we know and love today.

Scrabble struggled to take off for years until 1952, when the president of Macy’s placed a large order after discovering it on vacation. Soon enough, Scrabble was flying off shelves. The structure of Scrabble has remained the same since, although alterations to the rules have been made four times—in 1953, 1976, 1989, and 1999.