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Alfred Mosher Butts (April 13, 1899–April 4, 1993) was an American architect and the inventor of...

Alfred Mosher Butts (April 13, 1899–April 4, 1993) was an American architect and the inventor of the board game Scrabble in 1938. He was also an amateur artist and six of his drawings were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the early 1930s after working as an architect but now unemployed, Butts set out to design a board game. He studied existing games and found that games fell into three categories: number games such as dice and bingo; move games such as chess and checkers; and word games such as anagrams. A resident of Jackson Heights, it was there that the game of Scrabble was invented. Butts decided to create a game that utilized both chance and skill by combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players would draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words from their seven letters. A key to the game was Butts' analysis of the English language. Butts studied the front page of The New York Times to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used. He then used each letter's frequency to determine how many of each letter he would include in the game. He included only four "S" tiles so that the