The ENABLE Lexicon Study
By Lucian — builder & engineer, LK Forge
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 values still line up with how letters actually occur.
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. Bars are colored by Scrabble tile value.
1 pt 2 pt 3 pt 4 pt 5+ pt
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. Eleven times, a higher-value tile is actually the more common letter:
- H is worth 4 points but appears more often than B (worth 3).
- C is worth 3 points yet is more common than D, G, and even U.
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 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:
dermatoglyphicsuncopyrightable 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.
| 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.
Both distributions come straight out of the same word list behind our Word Unscrambler and Word Generator.
- Word list: the ENABLE open list (172,835 words) — the exact data the Word Unscrambler ships, fetched at runtime.
- Frequency: occurrences per 1,000 letters. Expected top three: E 115.1, S 95.2, I 90.1.
- Tile values: the standard English letter-value set, compared against frequency. Expected: 11 inversions, incl. H over B.
- 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).
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.