Lexiko was a word game invented by Alfred Mosher Butts.
Players drew nine tiles at random, and attempted to construct words from them.
[citation needed] In 1931, Butts wrote a paper entitled "Study of Games."
Around that time, he was reading "The Gold-Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe and noticed a line containing the English letter distribution.
In 1938, he began work on a board game based on Lexiko, which he called Criss-Cross Words, which was eventually renamed Scrabble.