The ENABLE Lexicon Study: Letter Frequency vs Scrabble Tile Values | LK Forge<br>Word Data The ENABLE Lexicon Study<br>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 list to see how well those prices still hold.
The mismatch, in one line<br>C is the 10th-most-common letter in English word-stock, yet Scrabble charges 3 points for it — more than the 1-point U it outnumbers. Eleven letters are priced out of step with how often they actually appear.
172,835<br>ENABLE words analyzed
11<br>tile value / frequency inversions
15<br>letters in the longest isograms
139×<br>more words start with S than X
How Often Each Letter Actually Appears<br>Frequency here is occurrences per 1,000 letters: every letter of every word counted, divided by the total letter count, times a thousand. Bars are colored by Scrabble tile value.<br>E S I A R N T O L C D U P M G H B Y F V K W Z X J Q lkforge.com<br>1 pt 2 pt 3 pt 4 pt 5+ pt
Where the Prices Break<br>A tile value is supposed to track rarity — the rarer the letter, the more it should cost. Across the full ENABLE list, that holds at the extremes (E is cheap, Q and Z are dear) but breaks in the middle. Eleven times, a higher-value tile is actually the more common letter:<br>H is worth 4 points but appears more often than B (worth 3).<br>C is worth 3 points yet is more common than D, G, and even U.<br>The single cleanest example is H against B: H costs a full point more, but shows up more often across the lexicon. If tile values were re-derived from ENABLE today, several 3- and 4-point consonants would get cheaper.
The Longest Words With No Repeated Letter<br>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:<br>dermatoglyphicsuncopyrightable
The Most Anagram-Rich Letters<br>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.<br>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<br>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.<br>S C P A R D M B T E I F H O G U L N W V K J Q Y Z X lkforge.com<br>Both distributions come straight out of the same word list behind our Word Unscrambler and Word Generator.
Reproduce this study Run it yourself →<br>Word list: the ENABLE open list (172,835 words) — the exact data the Word Unscrambler ships, fetched at runtime.<br>Frequency: occurrences per 1,000 letters. Expected top three: E 115.1, S 95.2, I 90.1.<br>Tile values: the standard English letter-value set, compared against frequency. Expected: 11 inversions, incl. H over B.<br>Extras: longest isograms (15 letters: dermatoglyphics, uncopyrightable), richest anagram set (A E P R S, 12 words), and per-letter word starts (S 18,988 → X 136).<br>Every number on this page is printed by one script against the shipped ENABLE list. SCRABBLE is a trademark of its respective owners; tile values are used here only as a public reference point.