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Scrabble

proper nounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈskɹæ.bəl//

A board game in which players draw letter tiles and take turns to make interlocking words like a crossword, scoring points according to the letters played and their positions on the board.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A board game in which players draw letter tiles and take turns to make interlocking words like a crossword, scoring points according to the letters played and their positions on the board.

    So that's what's in the forbidden room! Scrabble! I want to laugh, shriek with laughter, fall off my chair. This was once the game of old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas, to be played when there was nothing good on television. Or of adolescents, once, long long ago. […] Now of course it's something different. Now it's forbidden, for us.

    Start by asking students if they ever watch Wheel of Fortune, or play games like Hangman or Scrabble.® Ask whether they have ever noticed any patterns in the frequency with which letters appear.

    At the tournament level I dabble / But my tiles show a meaningless babble / I filled up my ranks / With a few extra blanks / And got busted for cheating at Scrabble

Etymology

A brand name, from the verb scrabble, James Brunot's rebranding (1948) of Alfred Butts's game Criss-Crosswords (1938).

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).