So have you heard about the Scrabble squabbles, the brouhaha over Scrabulous, the popular but unauthorized version of the game played online by millions of Facebook users? It was created by a pair of brothers in India, much to the dismay of Hasbro, controllers of the game in the United States, who have their own application on Facebook launched two years after Scrabulous and considered by most fans to be inferior.

Copyright infringement lawsuits! Howls of fan outrage! Threats of boycotts! A lot of action for a normally calm and contemplative word game. When last reported, Scrabulous had been pulled from Facebook and replaced with Wordscraper, having a new look — round tiles — and new rules.

Scrabble is certainly a franchise worth protecting, second only to Monopoly in sales, having sold about 100 million sets worldwide, with about 2 million sold in the United States alone each year. And the game has a somewhat more venerable history than you might imagine.

Its roots go back to the Great Depression when, in 1931, a Poughkeepsie, N.Y., architect named Alfred Mosher Butts was laid off from his job. Having grown up in a family of game-players, he challenged himself to create one of his own that would, in his words, "combine elements of luck and skill in the formation of words."

Using his architectural drafting equipment and working on blueprint paper, Butts created a game, using crossword puzzles — then a national craze — as his template, calling it Lexico. It comprised 100 tiles, each painted with a letter of the alphabet, and wooden racks made from pieces of molding, but had no playing board or assigned point values. The winner was the first to complete a seven-letter word.

Although Butts managed to sell a few homemade sets at $1.50 each, he was denied a patent for it. Undaunted, he made some modifications — there was now a scoring system based on Butts' study of cryptography and on the letter frequency count of words appearing on the front page of the New York Times. He renamed it Criss-Cross, and then Criss-Cross Words. During the next three years Butts sold or gave away 100 sets.

In 1947, businessman James Brunot convinced Butts that the game' had commercial potential and persuaded him to copyright it under the name Scrabble. Brunot established the Production and Marketing Co. to manufacture Scrabble in an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Conn., beginning operation in 1949. At the end of the year, after producing 2,400 sets, Brunot was in the red for $450.

Brunot was about to give up on this limited venture when sales suddenly soared. Macy's department store chairman Jack Strauss had discovered the game while on vacation and directed each Macy's store nationwide to place an order. It soon became a national mania, appealing to such notables as India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Hollywood's Darryl F. Zanuck and Broadway's Oscar Hammerstein II.

Sales rocketed from 2,500 in 1949, to 58,000 in 1952, and to 4.5 million in 1954.

When Brunot was no longer able to handle the demand, he licensed the rights to the firm of Selchow and Righter, though his company continued to make special sets. Later Selchow and Righter sold the rights to Hasbro.

Scrabble has been translated into more than a half-dozen languages and has been issued in a Braille version. There are junior editions, tournaments and special Scrabble dictionaries. It even became a daytime TV game show in 1984, running for six years.

Unfortunately for collectors, because the game has changed so little over the years, there is little value in vintage sets. Only certain deluxe or limited edition sets are of interest, such as one with white ivoroid tiles, and a cloth-and-vinyl edition.

Linda Rosenkrantz has edited Auction magazine and authored 18 books, including "Cool Names for Babies" and "The Baby Name Bible" (St. Martin's Press; www.babynamebible.com). She cannot answer letters personally. To find out more about Linda Rosenkrantz and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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