How was the letter distribution in Scrabble determined?
During the Great Depression, an out-of-work architect named Alfred Mosher Butts set out to invent a board game combining the vocabulary skills of anagrams and crossword puzzles with the element of chance. The game was originally named Lexico, then Criss-Cross Words. Butts studied the New York Times front page to calculate how often each of the 26 letters in the English language is used (with “E” used most frequently). He subsequently assigned point values to each letter and decided how many of each letter to include in the game. With his partner, game-loving entrepreneur James Brunot, he refined the rules and design of the concept, and renamed it Scrabble. The name, which means “to grope frantically,” was trademarked in 1948. In the early 1950s, according to legend, the president of Macy’s department stores discovered the game while on vacation and ordered it for his New York outlet. Within a year, everyone “had to have one” – and Scrabble sets were rationed to stores nationwide.
