Joshua Lewis
speaker
18 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2013
last heard Jan 2013
Joshua Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When Alfred Butz in the 30s invented Scrabble, he went and looked at the New York Times and dictionaries and a couple of different places where he found examples of the English language in use and used that to calculate the frequency at which different letters appeared.
And that was used as the basis for the point distribution in Scrabble.
And what's happened in the interim is that the dictionary of legal plays or legal words in Scrabble has changed.
And one of the notable additions to me were all of these short words that made it easier to play.
For example, Z and Q and X, you know, so you have words like QI and ZA.
And so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they're now much easier to play because of these newer tournament legal words.
So in addition to the original analysis that Alfred Butz did of looking at the frequency of letters in the English language, I looked at the frequency of letters broken out by word length, which is appropriate because two and three letter words and seven and eight letter words are more valuable than the other words in Scrabble.
And then I also looked at the ease of transitioning from one letter to another.
So, for example, with Q, it's very difficult to transition to anything but U. And so letters that were easy to transition to and from were worth less points.
And so with these three factors, frequency, frequency by length, and this ease of transitioning, I just took a combination of those statistics and used that to derive a value for each letter tile.
It's actually not hugely different.
There's tweaks here and there, but a lot of letters retain their current value.
And I think that's a good thing because really, if part of the analysis is the overall frequency of letters, then you would expect things to remain somewhat similar.
But there are a couple of notable places for me where things change.
One is the letter X, which is worth eight points, and the retail version of Scrabble, which in my analysis goes down to five points.
I think that's very appropriate because X is pretty easy to play.
It's got a lot of two-letter words.
I'm pretty sure I've broken 100.
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