Every Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 Song Scored as Scrabble Words – And, No, I Didn’t Do This

From Ricky Nelson to Taylor Swift, 68 Years of Chart-Toppers Get the Scrabble Treatment 

(October 29, 2026) – Did you ever imagine every No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 spelled out using Scrabble game tiles, with each title assigned a score based on the game’s familiar letter values?

Well, imagine no more.

DJROBBLOG was recently contacted by a researcher from the website unscramblex.com after one of its reps read my article about 2025 tying for the second-fewest No. 1s in chart history (yeah, I know, the kind of stuff only chart nerds think about).  The researcher thought I was geeky enough to appreciate a different count on the same chart and proceeded to score all 1,195 Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s from the very first, “Poor Little Fool,” in 1958 to the most recent, “Patient Zero,” earlier this month.

For nearly seven decades, Billboard has ranked songs by their popularity.  Now, someone has ranked those same chart-toppers by something far less conventional: how much their titles would be worth in a game of Scrabble.

To no surprise, the top scorer was a long-worded title: B.J. Thomas’s 1975 hit “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” at 92 points, though it needed five blank tiles (vs. the two that normally come with a standard Scrabble game) to complete.  The best-scoring song title one set of Scrabble tiles could actually spell was 1971’s “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)” by Paul Revere & the Raiders, at 84 points.

The lowest-scoring No. 1 titles were short ones.   Katy Perry’s “E.T.” featuring Kanye West, scored just two points, which tied with Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (no points for the numbers, obviously).  Rihanna’s “SOS” was next with three points, while six songs tied with four points each.  Of those six, four were legitimate Scrabble words: “Up” by Cardi B, “Sad!” by XXXTentacion, “Roar” by Katy Perry, and “Rise” by Herb Alpert were the legit words, while one — Starship’s “Sara” — was a proper name.  The remaining four-point title: “S&M,” also by Rihanna.  

Here were the top ten Scrabble scorers:

Of note, eight of the top ten included parenthetical subtitles (which were included in the scoring).  All ten came from the 20th century, with the most recent being Will to Power’s 1988 chart-topper, “Baby I Love Your Way/Freebird.”

For a refresher on Scrabble rules, players take turns building words (that are found in a standard dictionary) in crossword puzzle fashion, with each letter tile having different values.  Two blank tiles are provided and may be used as any letters (but once declared, they cannot be changed).  Proper names, compound-words, foreign words, multiple-word phrases, and nonsense terms (e.g., “Sussudio”) that are often found in song titles don’t count in Scrabble.  But those rules – as well as the limitations on blank tiles – were obviously forsaken for the purpose of UnscrambleX’s ultimate exercise in music geekdom.  It also appears that UnscrambleX assigned blank tiles (zero points) to those titles that repeated letters beyond the available tile inventory in a standard Scrabble game.

For background, UnscrambleX (unscramblex.com) is a free word unscrambler and Scrabble word finder, with millions of word-searches a year.  The Scrabble figures use the standard tile values and the North American tournament word list (NWL2023).

This blogger was fascinated by the marriage of Scrabble and Billboard’s No. 1s and gleefully accepted UnscrambleX’s offer to share its research with DJROBBLOG readers in exchange for credit and a link to its website.  The blog especially appreciated the insights UnscrambleX provided.  For example, they identified the artists with the highest-scoring titles on average (minimum three songs to qualify):

Among artists with more than three No. 1s, Elton John scored the highest per-song average of 34.7 points for his nine No. 1 songs (counting his duets and “That’s What Friends Are For”), while Diana Ross (six No. 1s) was second with an average of 34.5.  The three artists who scored the lowest (min. three No. 1s to qualify):

Apparently, the longer and more descriptive song titles favored by artists of earlier generations were a gold mine for Scrabble points. Today’s rappers? Not so much.

And while we’ve theorized that song titles have gotten shorter in recent decades, UnscrambleX’s findings provide some striking evidence.  The average No. 1 title of the 1970s scored 26.2 Scrabble points, compared with just 18.4 for those of the 2020s — a nearly 30% decline.  Even more revealing, the percentage of one-word No. 1 titles nearly quadrupled, from 8.5% in the 1970s to 32% in the 2020s.  Apparently, today’s hitmakers have learned to say more with less — or at least use fewer tiles doing it.

By the way, this blogger’s favorite song — a two-word title from 1980 — ranked a lowly No. 797 on the overall list with just 17 points. Clearly, great music doesn’t always translate into great Scrabble.  Where did your favorite No. 1 song rank?

For a complete breakdown of all the data – as well as all 1195 titles ranked – click here.  You can also index the rankings by decade – from the 1950s to today — for easier reference.

And for all your other word unscrambling Scrabble needs, visit UnscrambleX.com.  I thank them for choosing DJROBBLOG to spotlight this most unusual of word exercises.

DJRob

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.

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