Facebook fun: Is the game up for Scrabulous fans?

Close down the Facebook version of Scrabble and stop the cheats, says purist Jonathan Maitland

Kylie Minogue has been known to do it three times a day. Jonathan Ross does it with several other people at the same time.

	'One Scrabble player would swallow difficult letters to get rid of them'

And Nigella Lawson's husband, the multi-millionaire art dealer Charles Saatchi, is obsessed with it - but plays, it is said, for money. Suddenly Scrabble, a game traditionally played by grannies and men in cardigans, has become not only cool, but insanely popular.

And controversial - a word you would never see on a Scrabble board (it has far too many letters to be laid in one go) or hear mentioned in connection with the board game, until now. The reason?

This week its makers, Hasbro and Mattel, announced that they were taking steps to close down Scrabulous, the online version of the game, from the phenomenally popular social networking website Facebook.

The decision to have the application removed amid claims that it constitutes a breach of copyright, has been met with cries of anguish from some of the 600,000 people who play the online version every day.

The angry messages of disgust at the companies' actions have been piling up. One blogger posted just the one word, cunningly using an anagram to disguise his true feelings: KERNWAS.

The move has clearly been taken on commercial grounds. Scrabulous, the Facebook model invented in 2006 by a couple of Indian software whizzkids, is the most popular game that can be played on the site, and is said to earn the pair £13,000 a month from advertising. There are potentially huge profits to be made from Hasbro and Mattel marketing the game online themselves.

But when it comes to money, anecdotal evidence suggests its corporate owners may be short-sighted in banning it from Facebook. Thanks in the main to the boost in popularity among younger Facebook users, sales of the board games and its official dictionary are said to have increased astronomically.

As a word freak myself, I love Scrabble and regularly take part in national tournaments. For my stag night, I played 12 of my best friends simultaneously. However, after much deliberation with fellow addicts, I support the decision to take down Scrabulous on ethical grounds.

Friends who have played the Facebook version (and, as a purist, I refuse to) tell me that cheating during online games is rife: there are websites that can arrange instantly the seven letters on your rack into the highest scoring combination.

Other unscrupulous types simply leaf through official dictionaries before passing off words as their own. In proper Scrabble circles, this sort of behaviour would lead to instant disqualification.

Take the man who was caught literally eating his words at a tournament. He swallowed difficult letters to get rid of them. Or the player who was found taking a dictionary into the lavatory during a game.

On another occasion someone was caught "doing a Goldfinger" - after the James Bond villain who cheated at golf by dropping a ball down his trousers - by introducing new tiles to his rack via his sleeve.

The surge in Scrabble's popularity and the brouhaha over the Facebook version is extraordinary enough, but the story behind the game is equally fascinating.

It was invented by Alfred Butts, an architect from New York. His eureka moment came in 1933 when he read The Gold Bug, an Edgar Allan Poe short story about buried treasure. The hero had to break a code based on the alphabet. Poe wrote: "In English, the letter which most frequently occurs, is 'e'.

Afterwards, the succession runs thus: a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q x z." That got Alfred going. What about a game based on letters and their nominal values?

In 1938, Butts came up with an early, cruder version of Scrabble called Lexiko, which he manufactured himself. After one month, he'd sold two sets. Eventually renamed Scrabble, the tipping point came in the 1950s, when Jack Straus, the chairman of New York department store Macy's, played it.

Appalled to find his store wasn't stocking the game, he ordered thousands. This triggered similar orders from smaller retailers, and within months 2,000 sets a week were being sold. Soon, the game was lodged in America's consciousness.

"Before 1953 departs," wrote the Herald Tribune, "it can point to any number of notable events, from the inauguration of a Republican president, to the growth of Scrabble."

More than 50 years later, Scrabble still weaves its spell. More than 100 million sets have now been sold. And for some, the game has become an all-consuming vocation. These are the players who spend several hours a day learning obscure seven-letter words - like JADITIC [jade-like] and ATEBRIN [an anti-malarial drug] - which are the game's Holy Grail. Using all seven tiles at once is called a "bingo", and guarantees a 50-point bonus.

But no matter how good you think you are at Scrabble, there will always be someone better.

After the sensation of my stag night performance (played 12, won 11), I decided to enter a proper tournament, in Essex. I found myself up against a large, tracksuit-bottom-wearing Scrabble nut in his forties. Just before we started, he demolished a KitKat, methodically and frighteningly; my instinct told me I was about to suffer the same fate.

Less than an hour later, I'd been massacred by 165 points. I asked my opponent about his most devastating move, when he created three words at once, none of which I knew: JEE [variant of gee], AZO [denoting a compound that contains nitrogen] and RAJA [variant of rajah]. Did he know what they meant? "No, not really." Did it matter? "No, not really."

I, however, think it desirable - even if not essential - to know words' meanings when playing Scrabble. To concentrate solely on the numerical value of the constituent letters is reductive and a bit philistine. Our language deserves more respect. On some occasions though, ignorance can be bliss. At one tournament, an elderly woman's opponent played ORGASM.

She looked puzzled, and challenged the word's validity. Amid much stifled sniggering, the judges confirmed it did, indeed, exist. The old lady asked what it meant. She was told as delicately as possible. "Goodness me!" she exclaimed. "I must tell my husband when I get home."

I can't help wondering what dear old Alfred Butts would have made of all this. The one thing the game's inventor did not make, however, was a fortune. In the mid-1970s he sold his rights to Scrabble.

Showing a characteristic attention to detail, he calculated that his lifetime earnings from it were exactly $1,066,500. Which sounds a lot, but is a small fraction of the billion-plus pounds that Scrabble sales have generated.

Not that money mattered to Alfred. He died aged 93, in a nursing home, content to know he had dreamt up arguably the greatest board game of them all. Fittingly, he spent his last years doing what countless others have done before and since: playing Scrabble. And certainly not on Facebook.

• Jonathan Maitland presents the ITV1 current affairs show 'Tonight'