Lexiko

Lexiko was a word tile game designed and illustrated by Alfred Mosher Butts, built around one hundred square cardboard letter tiles whose letter frequencies Butts calculated by close analysis of the English text of Edgar Allan Poe's writing, so that common letters occurred far more often among the tiles than in Anagrams, the existing word game the analysis was meant to improve on. Players drew nine tiles at random and tried to construct words from the letters in hand, with no board or shared playing surface involved, unlike the game it would later become. Its name comes from the Greek lexicos, meaning of or for words. Manufacturers turned Lexiko down, and in 1938 Butts reworked its letter set and scoring ideas into a new board-based game he called Criss-Cross Words, which was later renamed Scrabble, making Lexiko the direct tile-frequency ancestor of one of the best-known word games ever published.