Recently I have seen quite a few blog posts written about re-evaluating the points values assigned to the different letter tiles in the
Scrabble™ brand Crossword Game. The
premise behind these posts is that the creator and designer of the game assigned point values to the different tiles according to their relative frequencies of
occurrence in words in English text, supplemented by information gathered while
playtesting the game. The points
assigned to different letters reflected how difficult it was to play those
letters: common letters like E, A, and R were assigned 1 point, while rarer
letters like J and Q were assigned 8 and 10 points, respectively. These point values were based on the English
lexicon of the late 1930’s. Now, some 70
years later, that lexicon has changed considerably, having gained many new
words (e.g.: EMAIL) and lost a few old ones. So, if one
were to repeat the analysis of the game designer in the present day, would one
come to different conclusions regarding how points should be assigned to
various letters?
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