Scrabble letter scores

A software creator has suggested revising the scores for the individual letters in the Scrabble game. The original scores were based on the occurrence of letters on the front page of an American newspaper in the 1930s, but the language has changed since then.

 

Q and Z are the only two letters in Scrabble currently worth ten points. Joshua Lewis, the software developer concerned, considered raising the score of a Q to 12, but downgrading a Z to 6 points, thus maintaining a discrepancy between very hard letters to place and more versatile ones. U is currently worth one point, as are all the vowels, but Lewis suggests raising this to two points. He has a point, I think, as, although U is fairly common, that is mainly because it appears as the first letter of so many words beginning Un-. If you haven't got an N among your seven letters you'll struggle more to place your U.

 

Lewis suggests raising the value of a G from two to three points. This is another interesting letter. G is very common in English words but mainly because of the number of words ending -ing.

 

I like Scrabble, but I must say that I am not usually overjoyed if I pick up a J, X, Q or Z, despite their being the highest-scoring letters. The humble S, which scores just one point, is a much more valuable tile, and can win you a score of far more than the 10 of a Z or Q. Having an S makes it a bit easier to find a 7-letter word, using all your tiles (especially if you have an E, A, R and T along with it) and makes it far easier to find a slot on the board to put your 7-letter word. If I had seven tiles forming the word STRANGE, although it only scores 8 points at face value, if I put the S at the end of a word already on the board, say ZEBRA, I would also gain the 16 points represented by those letters, plus gain a bonus of 50 points for putting down all my tiles at once.

 

The manufacturers of Scrabble, Mattel, say they have no plans to make any changes to the current scoring system.

 

Read the story here.

Comments

[john]

Interesting, Susan.

I play electronic scrabble constantly with a friend from my high school days. I sent her the link.

We've had conversations about how the game might be changed, not from a letter-weighting perspective, but from a procedural aspect. We're less than serious, but wouldn't it be interesting if one could pick up letters, change words already played, etc. One wonders if Mattel have ever considered those types of changes. I would suggest that if they do, they leave the original game and introduce a spin-off.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks, John. I think that the popular game Bananagrams has those features you mention, and that has proved very popular with players.