Contestants competed in a series of rounds to fill in words within a crossword puzzle for cash.
Viewers could win a Scrabble T-shirt by submitting a word and clue and having them selected for use in the show's opening title sequence.
Each matchup in Crossword was always male vs. female and was played until one contestant won by solving three words.
Originally, the Crossword round was played to determine who would face the show’s returning champion, if there was one, in the Scrabble Sprint.
Beginning on September 29, 1986, as part of a broader format change, the show began featuring two Crossword rounds per episode.
The first word of each game was oriented horizontally and built on a letter placed in the center square of the board.
If a game went on so long that the board became too crowded to hold any more words, it was cleared and the next was played horizontally from a letter in the center square.
If a champion retired after five days, a backstage coin toss in the first Crossword determined who began the first game.
The contestant with initial control of a word could either try to guess it immediately or draw two numbered tiles from a rack.
The remaining letters would be automatically placed, one at a time, until someone rang in with a correct guess; however, a miss locked that contestant out of the rest of the word.
Beginning in October 1984, contestants could win a cash bonus by placing a letter in a colored square and immediately solving the word.
Once the contestant in control believed they could solve a word, they hit their buzzer and then had to fill in all the missing letters in order, one at a time.
The accumulating pot from the earliest episodes returned, but money was added to it only while a contestant was giving letters after buzzing in.
Regular, blue, and pink squares respectively added $50, $100, and $200 (later $500), and the first contestant to solve three words won the entire pot.
The prize for winning was originally three times the pot from the preceding Crossword round, but was changed to a flat $1,500 after the first week.
This change remained in place for the remainder of the series run, and a fourth word was later added to the Sprint.
This tournament was conducted with a different format from usual Scrabble matches, and these changes were eventually made permanent.
A total of 188 contestants were selected via a nationwide search, with four competing on each episode in preliminary matches from Monday through Thursday over the first 12 weeks.
Two Crossword rounds were played, each worth $500 and with the bonus square payouts in effect, and each was followed by a four-word Scrabble Sprint.
The winner of the Sprint round in that match received an additional $5,000 and advanced to the semifinals, held during the 13th and final week of the tournament.
Four wild-card semifinalists were chosen from the eliminated contestants, and they and the 12 quarterfinal winners competed in four semifinal matches on Monday through Thursday of the final week.
With the adoption of the new format came a new final round, the Bonus Sprint, which gave the day's champion a chance to win a cash jackpot.
If the champion gave an incorrect guess or failed to respond immediately after pressing the plunger, the round ended.
When the series returned in 1993, the Bonus Sprint jackpot began at $1,000 and increased only if a contestant landed on a blue or pink square in the Crossword game and solved the word immediately, adding either $500 or $1,000 respectively.
The time slot had been occupied by the Bob Eubanks-hosted game show Dream House for the past 20 months.
On September 7, 1987, Scrabble was moved to the 12:30 p.m. time slot in order to make room for the daytime version of Win, Lose or Draw (replacing Wordplay, which had been canceled by NBC earlier that summer).
The network then announced it was trading the 3:00 pm timeslot back to its affiliates in exchange for the 12:00 pm timeslot from its affiliates; NBC was to bring back Scrabble and pair it with a new program based on the board game Scattergories hosted by Dick Clark in the noon hour.
In the markets that did air Scrabble at its scheduled time, the show faced off against local programming on other network affiliates, but never fared well enough against them.
The show was then replaced on June 14 by reruns of Classic Concentration which moved to 12:00 pm from a half-hour earlier and remained there until its final airing on December 31, 1993.