The book was written by Derryn Hinch. He was editor of The Sun in Sydney at the time of the book’s publication.

The election success of Derryn Hinch reminded me to look for the book. It was titled The Scrabble Book.

Hinch dedicated the book to his 88-year-old grandmother, Sarah Hinch, who he said was his first Scrabble opponent.

He said that Sophia Loren and Richard Burton did it to console Burton during one of his much-publicised estrangements from Elizabeth Taylor. They were actors, in case you didn’t know.

Hinch added that scrabble meant to scratch, scrape or paw with the hands. It also meant to make irregular, meaningless marks.

My big dictionary says Scrabble, with a capital S, is a proprietary name of a game in which players use tiles displaying individual letters to form words on a special board.

Although the first use of the word, with a capital S, is mentioned in the big dictionary only in 1950, the word scrabble, with a lower case s, goes back to at least 1537. Then the use was more on the sense of scribble.

The 1537 sense was to “scrable” on the doors of the gate. I presume this meant the scribble we sometimes see on toilet doors and this sense continued for many years.

The Scrabble we play was invented by Alfred Mosher Butts, an American architect, who invented the game of Scrabble in 1838.

Butts created a game by combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players would draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words. Butts studied the front page of The New York Times to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used.

Butts initially called the game Lexiko, but later changed the name to Criss Cross Word.

Butts later invented another game titled simply Alfred's Other Game; but it never took off. But Scrabble went on to sell millions. Several other examples of scrabble are in the big dictionary.

For example, one definition in the USA is a confused struggle or even a scramble, but in Australia, scrabble is often confused with scribble or writing on toilet walls or on anything else.

But I come back to The Scrabble Book, dedicated to Eve “even though her name is worth 18 points on a triple word square”. The book, “if you play it right and somehow stretch it through two triple word squares, can be worth 203 points”.

Alfred Butts, according to the book, said to his wife “Have a look at this when you’ve finished your breakfast… I think I have invented a new game”.

Her reaction is not recorded, but she probably said “hurry up and finish your breakfast so I can do the washing up”.

lauriebarber.com; lbword@midcoast.com.au