When the Great Depression left architect Alfred Butts out of work, he scrabbled around for something to do – and came up with a game whose ingenious mix of anagrams, crosswords, chance and skill is still a winner, 60 years on. And yet it nearly didn’t see the light of day…

The highest score that it is theoretically possible to achieve in a single turn in Scrabble is for the word “oxyphenbutazone”. Even at the top levels of tournament Scrabble, this has never actually happened: it would require the game to have unfolded in exactly the right way up to that point, leaving exactly the right open spaces, and the right combination of letters in the bag. But if it did, it would span three triple-word scores, creating seven other new words on the board, for a total of at least 1,778, depending on which official word list you used…

Hypothetically, there’s a chance that higher-scoring words have been played in amateur games, around tables strewn with the remains of lunch on slow Sunday afternoons, and never publicised. But it’s unlikely, and besides, we know what would happen: you’d play the word, then someone would dispute it, then you’d realise you’d never agreed which dictionary you were going to use, then you’d be able to find only a children’s dictionary with a couple of thousand words in it, then someone would knock over a glass of wine, and the cat would jump on the table, and if the game continued at all it would be with an undertone of resentment and edginess; the emotional temperature of the entire day would have changed. Scrabble does these things to people.

The official position is that Scrabble is 60 years old this year – though that’s slightly debatable and, believe me, Scrabble experts are the kind of people who like to debate it at length…

Read the whole article. A proper Scrabble fan would – even if it wasn’t about Scrabble.