The wildly popular word game, Scrabble(r), was conceived by Alfred Mosher Butts, an architect out of work during the Depression, and was trademarked in 1948. More than 40 years later, over 100 million Scrabble sets had sold worldwide, including 30 million in the USA alone. And, in 1991, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the first worldwide Scrabble tournament had been scheduled. With so many Scrabble aficionados, and the solid success of other Scrabble dictionaries, especially the Merriam-Webster titles, the time is right to add an illustrated dictionary to the Scrabble lexicon, using the Merriam-Webster text.