[nathell]

Little known is the fact that Butts actually did some manual fine-tuning of the frequencies he obtained from NYTimes. E.g., he decreased the number of S's to four in order to mitigate its affixability to almost every singular noun and enhance the gameplay.

[jlewis_st]

I did simple analysis of overall letter frequency and how that would map to a 98 tile set (not counting the blanks) and this is what I got:

A: 7 B: 2 C: 4 D: 3 E: 11 F: 1 G: 3 H: 2 I: 8 J: 1 K: 1 L: 5 M: 3 N: 6 O: 6 P: 3 Q: 1 R: 7 S: 9 T: 6 U: 3 V: 1 W: 1 X: 1 Y: 2 Z: 1

It makes a lot of sense to reduce the number of Ss for the sake of gameplay, and it seems like Butts redistributed those extra tiles amongst the vowels.