Are Scrabble Tiles Incorrectly Valued?

January 15, 2013 in Daily Bulletin

The next time you set up a game of Scrabble you might want to look into changing the amount of points that each letter is worth writes Laura Gray:

  • The inventor of Scrabble assigned the values of the letters based on the frequency with which they appeared on the front page of the New York Times in the 1930s.
  • Yet language has evolved since then, and the dictionary of legal Scrabble words has expanded. Letters such as Z which are now worth 10 points should only be worth 6.
  • Mattel, the maker of Scrabble, refuses to change the value of the letters, stating that this misallocation of points is part of the game and that skilled players can use this to their advantage.

Read more about other letters whose values need to be readjusted, and play around with a calculator that would show you how much words would be worth after the change over here.

Source: BBC