🔤 Live countdown
National Scrabble Day2029 Countdown
Friday, April 13, 2029
Date shown in UTC · Your timezone: —
About National Scrabble Day
National Scrabble Day is celebrated every April 13, the birthday of Alfred Mosher Butts, the American architect who invented the world's most famous word game in 1938. Fans mark the day by unboxing the board, disputing the validity of qi, and reminding relatives that two-letter words are the secret of champions.
The game itself is a quiet marvel of design. Butts analyzed letter frequencies on the front page of The New York Times and assigned each tile a value based on how rarely it appears, which is why an E is worth one point and a Z is worth ten. The blank tiles, the premium squares, and a rack of seven letters combine luck and skill so tightly that no two games feel alike.
Today Scrabble is sold in more than a hundred countries and dozens of languages, with official tournaments, ranked players, and word lists thicker than dictionaries. April 13 is the day casual players and tournament sharks alike celebrate the seven-letter magic of a well-played bingo.
History of National Scrabble Day
Alfred Mosher Butts lost his architecture job in the Great Depression and turned to game design. His earlier game Lexiko and an anagram-based predecessor failed commercially, but his 1938 combination of anagrams, crosswords, and a letter-scoring system became Scrabble's blueprint. He originally called it Criss-Cross Words and sold it from his workshop in Jackson Heights, New York, with little success. In 1948 entrepreneur James Brunot licensed the game, refined the rules and the premium-square layout, and renamed it Scrabble. Sales crawled until the president of Macy's reportedly became a fan in the early 1950s, after which demand exploded. Hasbro now owns the game in North America and Mattel elsewhere, and competitive play thrives worldwide, with national championships, ratings systems, and players who memorize entire word lists for fun.
2029 vs 2030 dates
Frequently Asked Questions
- When is National Scrabble Day?
- It arrives every year on April 13, chosen because it is the birthday of Scrabble's inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts, born in 1899.
- Is National Scrabble Day a public holiday?
- No. It is an unofficial observance for word lovers, not a public holiday. Schools and offices stay open, though classrooms often celebrate with vocabulary games.
- How do people celebrate National Scrabble Day?
- People celebrate by playing the game at home and online, learning obscure two-letter words, sharing high-scoring plays, and honoring the game's Depression-era origin story.
- Who invented Scrabble?
- Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect in New York, designed the game in 1938, basing tile values on the frequency of letters in everyday English.