Philip Nelkon traces the origins of a game that has become a household name and played in millions of homes

The Pentamind World Championship is the ultimate challenge for athletes of the mind. Modelled on the pentathlon of physical sports, this event tests which mind-sportsmen and women are most adept at playing a multitude of games and mental skills.

In Jackson Heights, New York, an architect lost his job in 1931. That was not unusual, as America was in the depths of the Depression, but the results of that job loss were to be far reaching. The architect was Alfred Mosher Butts and he decided to devote his enforced free time to devising a new board game. Analysing board games that already existed, he identified a gap in the market. Word games thus far had revolved solely around anagrams and crosswords. Surely a further development was possible? Butts felt that, like all the best board games, his word game should combine elements of luck and skill. He designed and built the first of many prototypes himself in 1932.

Over the next few years, the game went through many metamorphoses and many names, including Lexico, Criss-Cross Word and Alph, before 1948 when the name Scrabble was decided on and Butts's friend and colleague, James Brunot, began production in a small Connecticut warehouse, producing 5,000 sets a year.

The game was not an overnight success and for five years Brunot did little more than break even. The breakthrough came in 1953 when Jack Strauss, chairman of Macy's department store, played the game on holiday and on his return initiated a big promotion. The response was phenomenal and the following year more than a million sets were sold.

In late 1953 Butts licensed Scrabble in Australia and in 1954 it came to England, where it was - and still is - produced and marketed by Spear's Games, which holds the world rights, with the exception of America and Canada. The company was taken over in 1994 by Mattel, which is the largest toys and games producer in the world and most famous for Barbie dolls.

Scrabble is now produced in 30 languages, including a Braille version, and in versions as diverse as Catalan, Arabic and Afrikaans. Since its inception, more than 100 million sets have been sold in 130 countries. Of the five million sets sold per year, about 60 per cent are in English.

However, Scrabble is extremely popular in France and French sales exceed those of the UK. France was also the first country to implement world championships.

The English-speaking World Championships will be held for the fifth time in Melbourne later this year. Leading the British contingent will be 33-year-old Mark Nyman, of Leeds, who is the only British player to win a world championship, which he did in 1993. He is a producer on Channel 4's Countdown and often appears as the dictionary expert. The current world champion is Joel Sherman from New York, who will be defending his title. Although only 37, he retired some time ago from his job as a bank official because of stomach problems. The amiable Sherman is known as G. I. Joel - the initials standing for gastro-intestinal.

On winning the title in Washington, he said: "It's the one thing I'm really good at. Scrabble validates my existence."

Players from more than 40 countries will compete in the event, which will be covered live on the Internet. As global networks change the way we correspond, so some Scrabble addicts have found their own way of communication . When the mother of the Hollywood film star Mary Tyler Moore died, the actress placed the Scrabble letters Q and U in her coffin as a token of the love that her mother had for the game.

There are also instances of marriage proposals being spelt out. A less acceptable case of marital communication, or lack of it, occurred in November 1996 where a woman was charged with assault after her husband was struck on the forehead with a Scrabble board. The incident happened when he tried to stop her throwing their Thanksgiving turkey into the garden.

When Butts made that first board, he could not have imagined how universal his game would become 70 years later.