Friday, June 12, 2015

Edgar Allan Poe and Scrabble


Is Edgar Allan Poe the reason the board game Scrabble was invented? According to Mental Floss, it was!
More than 150 million Scrabble games have been sold since Alfred Butts invented it in 1938. Every hour, approximately 30,000 people start a game, which you can buy in 29 different languages. It has inspired countless fights about spelling and proper nouns, and has taught people how hard it is to use the letter “q” in a word if you lack access to a “u” as well.But none of this would ever have happened had Butts not been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug,” published in 1843, a character solves a cipher that is based on the popularity of English letters. “Now, in English, the letter which most frequently occurs is e. Afterwards, the succession runs thus: a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q x z,” he wrote.
The full story is here.

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