Welcome to the Lexicos blog! Here, we’ll be posting language, translation and communication-related advice that we hope you’ll find useful.
You’ll also find current stories about the cultural, social and political
dimensions of language as well as more personal perspectives on all things related to words.
Here, at Lexicos, we love to work with words.
Our company name Lexicos is in fact derived from the Greek εξικόν (lexicon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos), meaning “of words.” Not to be confused with Lexiko, a word game invented by American architect, Alfred Butts, which eventually became better known as Scrabble.
Lexiko was played with a set of 100 square cardboard tiles, using the same letter distribution later used by Scrabble but without a board. Players drew nine tiles at random, and attempted to construct words from them. Butts had carefully analyzed letter frequencies in newspapers and other printed works to figure out the ideal letter distribution for the game. In 1938, Butts began to work on a board game based on Lexiko, which he called Criss-Cross Words. This board game was eventually renamed Scrabble.