Words. I really like words. That is probably obvious by now. I like unusual words, old words, words nobody uses anymore.
I also like games with words. Maybe because I like to get my brain moving. And I like a challenge.
But all those words are made up of combinations from 26 letters. For English, that is.
However, not all letters pull equal weight in English. Some of them, we see all the time, everywhere. They work overtime, it seems.
The most common letters in English are generally:
E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D
Poor little E appears more than any other letter by a considerable margin. You’d think it would be worn out. But it keeps going and going.
Meanwhile, some letters are much rarer:
Q, J, Z, X, V, K
Those letters tend to make fewer appearances, which is why they often carry higher point values in games.
And speaking of games…
Scrabble was invented in the 1930s by architect Alfred Mosher Butts during the Great Depression. He studied newspaper front pages and counted letter frequencies to decide how many tiles each letter should receive and what point value they deserved. That is why common letters like E are worth only one point, while Q and Z are worth ten.
The highest-scoring single Scrabble word ever played in competition reportedly earned more than 1,700 points using multiple bonuses.
Another good word game? Dear old Hangman.
Nobody knows exactly where Hangman originated, but versions appeared in the late 1800s. The game has become controversial in some schools because of the hanging imagery, leading teachers to replace it with things like “Snowman,” “Flower,” or “Rocket Ship.”
If you want to improve at Hangman, statisticians suggest guessing:
E, A, R, I, O, T, N, S on your first try.
That sounds suspiciously like cheating to me.
And then there is Wordle, which somehow convinced millions of adults to become emotionally invested in a five-letter word before breakfast.
Josh Wardle created Wordle in 2021 as a gift for his partner. The game exploded worldwide. The first Wordle answer ever used was CIGAR.
People have since analyzed thousands of Wordle solutions and discovered starting words packed with common letters tend to perform best. Words like:
SLATE
CRANE
STARE
ARISE
Apparently, choosing XYLYL as your first guess is not considered optimal.
And here is another curious thing.
The longest word playable in Scrabble depends on the board setup. But here is one for the record books.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Forty-five letters.
It looks like I dropped something on my keyboard. But if someone played this in a game? I think I’d have to consult the dictionary.
By the way, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is an invented long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.
And look. There is only one “e” in the entire mess of things with that strange, long word.
Oh. The games people play. And the words we choose when we play them.
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“A word after a word after a word is power.” — Margaret Atwood
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“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly. They’ll go through anything.” — Aldous Huxley
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“Life is more fun if you play games.” — Roald Dahl
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“Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences.” — Pierre Baillot
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