This was originally published on the LK Forge blog, where the charts are interactive.
Scrabble's tile values were set in the 1930s by counting letters on a newspaper page. We counted every letter across all 172,835 words in the ENABLE open word list — not the TWL or CSW/SOWPODS Scrabble dictionaries, just the open list — to see how well those 90-year-old values still line up with usage. They don't, in eleven places.
C is the 10th-most-common letter in English word-stock, yet Scrabble scores it 3 points — more than the 1-point U it outnumbers. Eleven letters carry a tile value that doesn't line up with how often they actually appear.
The numbers
| ENABLE words analyzed | 172,835 |
| Tile value / frequency inversions | 11 |
| Letters in the longest isograms | 15 |
| More words start with S than X | 139× |
How often each letter actually appears
Frequency here is occurrences per 1,000 letters: every letter of every word counted, divided by the total letter count, times a thousand. E leads at 115.1 per 1,000, S is second at 95.2, I third at 90.1. Q and J tie for last at 1.6.
Where value and frequency diverge
Butts set higher values for rarer letters, so by design tile value roughly tracks how uncommon a letter is — a rough stand-in for how hard it is to play. Across the full ENABLE list that alignment holds at the extremes (E is common and worth 1; Q and Z are rare and worth 10) but breaks down in the middle. The harness finds all 11 inversions — every case where a higher-value letter is actually more common than a lower-value one. Here is the complete list:
| More common (tile value) | Rarer, but lower-value (tile value) | Frequency (per 1,000 letters) |
|---|---|---|
| H (4 pt) | B (3 pt) | H 23.2 vs B 18.4 |
| C (3 pt) | D (2 pt) | C 40.9 vs D 33.8 |
| C (3 pt) | G (2 pt) | C 40.9 vs G 27.0 |
| C (3 pt) | U (1 pt) | C 40.9 vs U 32.7 |
| D (2 pt) | U (1 pt) | D 33.8 vs U 32.7 |
| M (3 pt) | G (2 pt) | M 28.4 vs G 27.0 |
| P (3 pt) | G (2 pt) | P 29.4 vs G 27.0 |
| K (5 pt) | W (4 pt) | K 8.5 vs W 7.4 |
| Q (10 pt) | J (8 pt) | Q vs J — 2,536 vs 2,497 uses* |
| Z (10 pt) | J (8 pt) | Z 4.7 vs J 1.6 |
| Z (10 pt) | X (8 pt) | Z 4.7 vs X 2.9 |
* Q and J both round to 1.6 per 1,000 letters, so the ranking uses exact counts: Q edges J on raw usage (2,536 vs 2,497) across the 172,835 words.
The single cleanest example is H against B: H is worth a full point more, but shows up more often across the lexicon. If tile values were re-derived from ENABLE frequencies today, several 3- and 4-point consonants — C, H, M, P — would come out lower.
The longest words with no repeated letter
An isogram is a word in which no letter repeats. The longest in ENABLE are exactly 15 letters — and there are only two of them: dermatoglyphics and uncopyrightable.
The most anagram-rich letters
Group every word by its sorted letters and one set wins: the five letters A, E, P, R, S rearrange into 12 different ENABLE words — apers, apres, asper, pares, parse, pears, prase, presa, rapes, reaps, spare, spear.
| Letters | Words | The words |
|---|---|---|
| A E P R S | 12 | apers, apres, asper, pares, parse, pears, prase, presa, rapes, reaps, spare, spear |
| A E L R S T | 11 | alerts, alters, artels, estral, laster, ratels, salter, slater, staler, stelar, talers |
| A E L S T | 10 | least, setal, slate, stale, steal, stela, taels, tales, teals, tesla |
| A E I N R S T | 9 | anestri, antsier, nastier, ratines, retains, retinas, retsina, stainer, stearin |
Which letter starts the most words
S runs away with it: 18,988 ENABLE words start with S. At the other end, only 136 start with X — a spread of roughly 139 to 1.
About the Scrabble reference
SCRABBLE is referenced here only descriptively, as the source of the standard English tile-value set — a public reference point for comparison, not an official Scrabble analysis. SCRABBLE is a trademark of its respective owners; this post is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the trademark holder.
Reproduce it yourself
The harness is public and deterministic — one script against the shipped ENABLE list (172,835 words), printing frequency per 1,000 letters, tile-value inversions, isograms, anagram-richest sets, and starting-letter counts.
ENABLE lexicon harness (public gist)
Every number on this page is printed by that one script. Run it yourself to check any figure above to the exact digit.
The interactive charts are on the LK Forge blog.
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