Fancy a game of Lexiko? Or how about Alph? Appropriately enough for a word game, it was only when Scrabble acquired the name millions now know it by that it really started to take off, spawning special sets for kids and travellers, tournaments with fat cash prizes, a television show – even a dirty-word version.

Today, more than 150 million sets have been sold in 29 languages. It has found its way into one in three American homes and an estimated 30,000 games are started around the world every hour – which is an awful lot of rainy afternoons and otherwise congenial family gatherings ruined by spats over whether ‘za’ is a legitimate word or not.

The game also formerly known as It and Criss-Cross Words acquired its lasting moniker in 1948, but its story begins 15 years earlier, when a 32-year-old architect named Alfred Mosher Butts joined the millions who’d already lost their jobs in the Great Depression. Inspired by Charles Darrow’s success as the nominal inventor of Monopoly, Butts sat in his apartment in Queens, New York City, pondering the board games market. There were three types of game, he determined: move games like chess, number games such as bingo, and word games, of which he could think of just one example, Anagrams.