Today we celebrate one Alfred Mosher Butts, born on this day in 1899. Gameplaying word lovers may not need us to spell out his valuable legacy: Butts was the fellow whose love of the crossword puzzle (known as a "word cross" when they were invented, back when Butts was just a boy) led to his developing a board game of his own—using recycled checkerboards and balsawood tiles. (来源：英语杂志 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

In those early versions, the game began by spelling out a word at the upper left hand side of the board (instead of, as today, at the center of the board). It took more than a decade and some tweaking from others before Butts' creation began to be successfully marketed. Half a century later, Hasbro, which now owns the trademark, refers to it as the "Scrabble crossword game."

These days, players can enjoy Scrabble™ on virtual gameboards and study online collections of stems and hooks. In Scrabble™, a hook is a letter that can be added to the front or back of a word to form a new word; adding T to HANK makes THANK, for example. Stem names a group of letters from which other words can be constructed by the addition of a letter or letters. Although stems aren't necessarily words, we'll close with a mention of the six-letter word stem which can be reworked into 69 different words by the addition of a seventh letter: SATIRE.