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Triple Word Score! April 13 is National Scrabble Day!

Today celebrates the birthday of Scrabble inventor, Alfred Butts (what a name!), born on April 13, 1899. After losing his job as an architect during the Depression, Butts created the popular word game in 1938.

According to Wikipedia:

Butts decided to create a game that utilized both chance and skill by combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players would draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words from their seven letters.

A key to the game was Butts' analysis of the English language. Butts studied the front page of The New York Times to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used. He then used each letter's frequency to determine how many of each letter he would include in the game. He included only four "S" tiles so that the ability to make words plural would not make the game too easy.

If you ask most people, he could've done without so many Qs and Zs.

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> From the National Scrabble Association, Cool Words to Know
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