Lexiko

Lexiko was a word game invented by Alfred Mosher Butts. It was a precursor of Scrabble. The name comes from the Greek "lexicos", meaning "of 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

Butts began work designing Lexiko in 1931, in response to a perceived dearth of word-based games on the market. He carefully analyzed letter frequencies in newspapers and other printed works to determine the ideal letter distribution for the game. The game design 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 based on Lexiko, which he called "Criss-Cross Words."

References

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

External links

* [http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/scrabble/index.html NPR: history of Scrabble and Lexiko]
* [http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0901/fatsis.html Excerpt from Word Freak]