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← Why E Is Worth One Point

Why E Is Worth One Point

Three short lessons on counting words: how the letter values in a famous word game came from counting newspapers, the law that most words are rare, and why every language needs its own bag of tiles.

Spark & Whetstone · sparkwhetstone.org/learn/why-e-is-worth-one-point · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Answers are at the end, so you can try each question first.

Lesson 1. Counting the newspaper

In the late 1930s an out-of-work architect, Alfred Butts, designed a word game and needed to know how many of each letter to make. He counted letters in newspaper text by hand.

Common letters became cheap and plentiful; rare ones became valuable. That is why E is worth 1 point and Q and Z are worth 10 in the English version of the game that grew from his.

Question. Why is Z worth 10 points in English?

  1. It looks hardest to write.
  2. It is one of the rarest letters in English text.
  3. It is the last letter.

Say it back. In your own words: where did the letter values come from?

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Lesson 2. Most words are rare

Count every word in a large body of text and a pattern appears: the most common word is used about twice as often as the second, three times as often as the third, and so on. This is called Zipf's law, after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf.

In English, a few dozen words such as the, of and and make up a large share of everything written, while most words in the dictionary turn up rarely.

Question. Under Zipf's law, the most common word appears about how often compared with the second most common?

  1. The same
  2. About twice as often
  3. Ten times as often

Say it back. Say it back: what does Zipf's law say about common and rare words?

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Lesson 3. Every language its own bag

A tile bag built for English is wrong for other languages. Spanish needs more A and O; German more E and N. In Vietnamese, NG is a single sound written with two letters, so a Vietnamese bag treats it as one tile.

Counting real text is how each language gets a fair game.

Question. Why would a Vietnamese word-game bag have an NG tile?

  1. NG is one sound, written with two letters.
  2. It saves space in the box.
  3. English games have one too.

Say it back. In your own words: why does each language need its own bag?

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At the table: Count a page

Players: two or more, 8 or older. You'll need: one page of a newspaper or book, a pencil and paper.

  1. Pick one paragraph. Each person takes a few letters to count.
  2. Count how many times your letters appear.
  3. Put all the letters in order from most to least common.
  4. Give the top letter 1 point and the rarest 10. Do your values match the game's?

Answers

  1. It is one of the rarest letters in English text. — Rare letters score high. Z is one of the least used letters in English text.
  2. About twice as often — The top word appears roughly twice as often as the second.
  3. NG is one sound, written with two letters. — In Vietnamese, NG is a single sound, so it makes sense as one tile.