Scrabble: Every Word Has Its Worth Quiz

Answer:

Alfred Mosher Butts, an American architect in the early 1930s, was going through a difficult time in his life. Like many during the Great Depression (1929), he found himself unemployed after being fired from the architecture firm where he worked. But Butts was not the kind of person to give up.

As a crossword puzzle enthusiast, he spent entire days researching the children's game market. He decided to focus on word games. In the game he invented, players are given seven random letters each turn and must create new words on the board. His research was particularly thorough and systematic. He scanned front pages of "The New York Times" and other newspapers over a period of time to measure how frequently each letter appeared in the language, so he could assign each letter an appropriate score based on its frequency.

The game was initially called Lexiko before the name Scrabble was chosen. Sales were slow for a few years, but in 1952 Macy's ordered large quantities of the game, and by 1953 more than a million sets of Scrabble had been sold. Sales continued to grow from there.

In the traditional English-language version of Scrabble, the scoring is:

1 point: A, E, I, O, U, L, N, R, S, T
2 points: D, G
3 points: B, C, M, P
4 points: F, H, V, W, Y
5 points: K
8 points: J, X
10 points: Q, Z

The less frequently a letter appears in the English language, the higher its score, and vice versa.