A Short History of Word Games

People have been playing with letters for about as long as there have been letters to play with. Here's a quick, friendly walk through a couple thousand years of word games — and where a backwards-spelling game like ours fits in the family tree.

Word squares in the ancient world

The oldest word games we know about weren't printed in newspapers — they were scratched into walls. The most famous is the Sator Square, a five-by-five grid of Latin words found at several ancient Roman sites, including one preserved in the ruins of Pompeii. Its five words read the same left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and bottom to top:

Nobody knows for certain what the square meant to the folks who carved it — a charm, a joke, a bit of showing off — but it proves something we hold dear around Haybell Holler: the urge to flip words around and see what happens is very, very old.

Anagrams and the parlor-game era

Rearranging the letters of one word to make another — the anagram — goes back to the ancient Greeks, and it stayed popular for centuries. Medieval and Renaissance writers hid names and messages in anagrams; some took them seriously as omens, others just enjoyed the puzzle. By the 1800s, anagrams had become proper home entertainment. Victorian families passed winter evenings on word-building contests, rebuses, and riddles, and a tile game called Anagrams — race to steal and rearrange lettered tiles — became a parlor staple in the 19th century. No screens, no timers, just a fire going and somebody insisting that their word was too a real word.

The crossword craze of the 1910s and '20s

The modern era kicks off in December 1913, when an editor named Arthur Wynne published a diamond-shaped "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World newspaper. Readers loved it, the name flipped to "cross-word," and within a decade the crossword was a full-blown national craze. In 1924, a brand-new publishing house called Simon & Schuster launched its very first book — a crossword collection — and it sold like hotcakes at a county fair. Newspapers that had sneered at the fad soon surrendered and ran puzzles of their own. The crossword proved something important: ordinary folks would happily wrestle with letters every single day, just for the satisfaction of it.

Scrabble takes the table

During the Great Depression, an out-of-work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts sat down and studied how often each letter appeared on the front page of the newspaper. From those letter counts he built a tile game he called Lexiko, later reworked as Criss-Cross Words. It went nowhere for years — until an entrepreneur named James Brunot picked it up in the late 1940s, tidied the rules, and renamed it Scrabble. In the early 1950s the game caught fire (as the story goes, a Macy's executive played it on vacation and ordered it for the store), and Scrabble went on to become one of the best-selling board games ever made. Butts's big idea — that letters should be worth something, with rare letters paying more — quietly shaped almost every word game that came after, including ones where the letters earn you barnyard cash.

Word games hit the airwaves

Once television arrived, word games followed. Password had partners coaxing each other toward a secret word with one-word clues starting in the early 1960s. Wheel of Fortune, which first spun up in the mid-1970s, turned the humble hangman-style letter reveal into one of the most-watched shows in American history. Britain's Countdown made an institution out of building the longest word from nine random letters against a ticking clock — and that clock matters to our story, because TV taught the world that word games are more thrilling with a timer breathing down your neck.

The digital era and the daily-puzzle wave

Computers and phones changed everything about how word games reach people. Early computer classics like Bookworm and Text Twist put letter-scrambling on desktops in the 2000s. Then Words With Friends arrived on phones in 2009 and made playing a Scrabble-style game with your cousin three states away as easy as sending a text. Mobile hits like Wordscapes kept millions of people building words on their lunch breaks. And in 2021 a little free web game called Wordle — one five-letter word a day, six guesses, shareable little colored squares — swept the whole world practically overnight and was bought by The New York Times in early 2022. The daily-puzzle wave it kicked off is still rolling, and it re-proved the old crossword lesson: give folks one satisfying word challenge a day and they'll come back every morning like it's chores.

Where backwards spelling fits in

Every branch of this family tree contributed something. The Sator Square gave us the thrill of words that run in reverse. Anagrams gave us letter rearrangement. The crossword gave us the daily habit. Scrabble gave us letters with cash value. TV gave us the countdown clock. And the mobile era gave us games you can play in the pasture, the porch, or the pickup line at school.

A backwards-spelling game gathers all of it into one feed bucket: you take a familiar word, run it tail-first like the ancients did, race a timer like a game show, and earn money for your speed like a tile on a triple-word square. It's a young game standing on some mighty old shoulders — and once you've trained your brain to read right-to-left, you're taking part in a tradition older than the alphabet game itself.

Keep going

Want more? Meet the words that read the same in both directions in our guide to palindromes, learn how common English letter patterns behave in reverse, see why backwards spelling is genuine brain training, and pick up practical pointers on our Tips & Strategy page.