''Lexiko'' was a word game invented by Alfred Mosher Butts. It was a precursor of ''

Scrabble ''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...

''. The name comes from the Greek , meaning "of or for words". ''Lexiko'' was played with a set of 100 square cardboard tiles, with the same letter distribution later used by ''Scrabble'' (see Scrabble letter distributions), but no board. Players drew nine tiles at random, and attempted to construct words from them.

History

In 1931, Butts wrote a paper entitled "Study of Games." In his paper, he described three categories of games: board, number games using playing cards or dice, and letter games (or games that fell into more than one). He noted that, although the most popular games were of the first two (e.g.,

chess Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...

and

backgammon Backgammon is a two-player board game played with counters and dice on tables boards. It is the most widespread Western member of the large family of tables games, whose ancestors date back at least 1,600 years. The earliest record of backgammo ...

), the best letter game readily available was Anagrams. Around that time, he was reading " The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe and noticed a line containing the English letter distribution. This gave him an epiphany: Anagrams would be more fun if the most common letters in English were more common in the game. He carefully analyzed letter frequencies in newspapers and other printed works to determine the ideal letter distribution for the game. With a few other changes, he named his project ''Lexiko''. The

game design Game design is the process of creating and shaping the mechanics, systems, rules, and gameplay of a game. Game design processes apply to board games, card games, dice games, casino games, role-playing games, sports, Wargame (video games), war ga ...

was rejected by games manufacturers such as Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, but Butts was able to sell copies on his own, though not enough to recoup his development expenses. In 1938, he began work on a

board game A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects () that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the ...

based on ''Lexiko'', which he called ''Criss-Cross Words'', which was eventually renamed ''

''.The history of ''Lexiko'' is discussed in '' Word Freak'' by Stefan Fatsis.

References

External links

NPR: history of ''Scrabble'' and ''Lexiko''
Party games Scrabble Word games Games and sports introduced in 1931 {{Game-stub