Originally Letterbox was a paper and pencil game. The players each have a sheet of paper in front of them, on which they draw up some grids. One of the players draws a letter from a bag. (Scrabble tiles can be used.) When every player has placed the letter on his or her sheet, the next letter is drawn. Once all sixteen cells have been filled in, everyone adds up their scores.

Now there is a computer game version of Letterbox.

I originally learned the game from a teacher friend. I have never read anything about it or met anyone else who knows of exactly the same game. Please let me know if you have heard of the game or any similar game.

Origins of the Game

A somewhat similar game is described in some game books under the name of either "Word Squares" or (confusingly) "Crossword". This is a pencil and paper game for multiple players, usually played on a 5 by 5 or larger grid. The key difference from Letterbox is that the letters are not random, but are chosen by each player in turn, the aim being to make it hard for everybody else, while setting up opportunities for yourself. (There is a detailed description of this game in The Best Games People Play by Richard Sharp.)

This was the way things stood until 2005 in my quest to uncover the origins of Letterbox. But then two things happened in quick succession: I discovered David Parlett's book, The Guinness Book of Word Games (see the Links page for more about this book); and I heard from someone who remembers a 4 by 4 word game called Letterbox!

David Parlett's book gives a detailed account of the game described above where players take turns to pick a letter. He calls the game "Wordsworth", but notes that it is known under various other names, including "Crossword", "Scorewords" and "Wordsquares". The book also mentions "Criss-Cross", a game played with the special deck of cards supplied with a board game named Lexicon, which was released in 1925 and was quite a craze for a time. The Lexicon cards show letters of the alphabet, distributed according to frequency of use, much like the letter tiles in Scrabble, so Criss-Cross sounds like it must have been very similar to Letterbox, except for being 5 by 5 rather than 4 by 4.

When I wrote to David Parlett to see if he had any more information about this type of game, he drew my attention to the card game Poker Squares. (As well as knowing a lot about word games, it seems David is one of the foremost authorities on card games!) Poker Squares is a type of patience - or solitaire if you're American - where you deal the cards one at a time and arrange them in a 5 by 5 layout, with the aim of getting the best possible set of poker hands in the rows and columns. It seems likely that this is the ultimate source of the whole family of make-interlocking-words-in-a-square-grid-using-letters-presented-one-at-a-time games.

At the same time as I was exchanging emails with David Parlett, I heard from someone who remembered a TV game show called "$50,000 Letterbox", which was shown in Australia in the early 1980s. In the TV version, there was a possible solution with a four-letter word in every row and column - an arrangement known as a magic word square, or simply a word square. It was this solution which would win the contestant the $50,000 prize, but my correspondent had never seen anyone win.

The TV show was produced by the Seven Network in Perth, and started out on a lower prize budget as "$25,000 Letterbox". See Flashback #28 at the television.au Flashback Archive (which is where the photo on the right is hosted) and also the CV of Paul Makin, who compered the show.

I'd never heard of this TV game, but there's probably a connection to the paper and pencil game that I learnt. It would seem to be too much of a coincidence for there to be two games in Australia called Letterbox involving the placement of letters in a 4 by 4 array. Perhaps the paper and pencil game was a method of playing such a word-building game at home without having to do all the preparation that would be necessary for the perfect word square version.

The perfect word square game sounds interesting - I'll have to think about its potential as a computer game. (There certainly won't be any $50,000 prizes on this Web site!)

Educational ... and Fun!

Arguably, the Letterbox game - online or on paper - has educational value for children or anyone else learning to read and write in English. Not only does it encourage you to learn new words and how they are spelt, but it also leads you to think about the different patterns in which letters are typically combined to make words.

But, most importantly, it is fun to play, no matter how well you think you know the English language.