the game Scrabble, a real word which means "to scratch frantically". In 1949, Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year but lost money. According to legend, Scrabbles big break came in 1952 when Jack Straus, president of Macy's, played the game on vacation. Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order, and within a year, "everyone had to have one". In 1952, unable to meet demand himself, Brunot sold manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter, one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the game. Harriet T. Righter licensed the game from entrepreneur James Brunot in 1952. "It's a nice little game. It will sell well in bookstores," she remembered saying about Scrabble when she first saw it. In its second year as a Selchow and Righter product, 1954, nearly four million sets were sold. Selchow and Righter bought the trademark to the game in 1972. JW Spear (since 1994 a subsidiary of Mattel) began selling the game very successfully in Australia and the UK on January 19, 1955. In 1986, Selchow and Righter was sold to Coleco, which soon afterward went bankrupt. Hasbro purchased the company's assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi. In 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime game show on NBC. The Scrabble game show ran from July 1984 to March 1990, with a second run from January to June 1993. The show was hosted by Chuck Woolery. Its tagline in promotional broadcasts was, "Every man dies; not every man truly Scrabbles." In 2011, a new TV variation of Scrabble, called Scrabble Showdown, aired on The Hub cable channel, which is a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Inc. and Hasbro. Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004. Evolution of the rules The "box rules" included in each copy of the North American edition have been edited four times: in 1953, 1976, 1989, and 1999. The major changes in 1953 were as follows. It was made clear that: words could be played through single letters already on the board, a player could play a word parallel and immediately adjacent to an existing word provided all crossing words formed were valid, the effect of