How were Scrabble’s letter scores decided?

Why is a Q worth ten points and an E worth just one? It feels like the kind of thing that a team of mathematicians must have worked out with a supercomputer. The Apple, who has a surprisingly competitive streak at board games, actually knows this one. The Sole, who has heard many a spelling test from under a desk, is thrilled to tell the rest.

The short answer

Scrabble’s inventor, Alfred Mosher Butts, worked out the letter scores and tile counts by hand. He studied how often each letter appeared on the front page of The New York Times, and used those counts to decide how many of each tile to include and how many points each was worth.

The real story

Butts was an architect from Poughkeepsie, New York, who found himself out of work during the Great Depression. He decided to invent a game, and wanted one that mixed luck and skill. He combined the letter shuffling of anagram games with the interlocking grid of crossword puzzles.

The big design problem was balance. If there were too many rare letters, nobody could make words. If common letters were worth as much as rare ones, there would be no strategy. So Butts did some old-fashioned data analysis, painstakingly tallying letters in newspaper text. Common letters like E became plentiful and cheap, while rare ones like Q and Z became scarce and valuable.

His game went through a couple of names. It was first called Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words. Established game companies turned it down. Eventually an entrepreneur and games fan named James Brunot took an interest, worked with Butts to refine the rules and board, and is credited with the name Scrabble, a real English word meaning to grope about frantically. The name was trademarked in 1948, and the game took off over the following years.

Remarkably, Butts’s letter values have stayed essentially the same ever since. He lived to see his invention become a worldwide favourite, and died in 1993 at the age of 93.

Why people get it wrong

Today we expect numbers like these to come from algorithms and big data. Scrabble feels so finely balanced that we assume serious computing went into it. In reality, it was one patient man, a newspaper and a pencil.

Newspaper English is not quite the same as the full dictionary, so some keen players argue a few letters are slightly under- or over-valued. But the system has held up for generations.

The Wiper declares Butts’s method fair and above board. He would tally the letters himself, but he would forget the totals immediately.

“One out-of-work bloke with a newspaper did the maths for a game the whole world plays. Makes me think all those years under desks weren’t wasted after all.”