Paparazzi arrived at a beach in Mexico last week, eager to capture some racy material. They had every reason to be optimistic: Lindsay Lohan, the übercelebrity and Hollywood hell-raiser, was there with her girlfriend. Both were wearing very little, the day was hot, the photographers were poised to capture scenes of marvellous debauchery. Instead, the two women began to play Scrabble.

The game has come a long way since its conception in the New York apartment of an out of work architect at the height of the Great Depression. It was there, in 1931, Arthur Butts decided that the world lacked a compelling word game.

If he could devise a successful new word game, he might follow in the footsteps of his fellow American, Charles Darrow, who was then making a fortune out of a new board game called Monopoly.

After a year he had arrived at a word game with letter tiles, though no board. His critical breakthrough was ensuring that different letters were provided in roughly the same frequency as they occur in English – Butts achieved this by counting how often they appeared on front pages of newspapers.

After 17 years of being turned down by successive manufacturers, one of his sets fell into the hands of James Brunot, a civil servant, who bought the rights to manufacture it in return for a small royalty.

The breakthrough moment came in 1952, when the president of the New York department store Macy’s played Scrabble while on holiday, and returned home wanting to know why his own store did not stock it. By the end of 1953 New York was in the grip of a Scrabble craze. Butts and Brunot were bought out, for $265,000 and $1.325 million respectively.

Mattel, which bought rights to the game in 1994, says that 100 million sets have been sold in 121 countries. Lately it has even begun to shed its image as the pastime of men and women in knitted jumpers, becoming a respectable pursuit for actresses in bikinis. Kylie Minogue, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna and the members of the indy band Blur have all claimed to enjoy Scrabble.

Mattel is less keen on Scrabble’s metamorphosis into the online game Scrabulous – the concept of Rajat and Jayant Argwalla of Calcutta – that gained a fan base of millions on the social networking site Facebook. Threatened with legal action, Facebook removed the application and a legal battle rumbles on.

Mattel has launched an official online version since, and the Argwallas a subtly different application called Wordscraper.

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