Hidden inside alas sit aals and alas, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 12 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
aals and alas tie for the highest Scrabble score from alas at 4 points. The top 10 of 12 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 four-letter words hiding in alas: one comes from rearranging its letters, and alas itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are aals and alas, each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling alas turns up 6 three-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these three-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are aal, aas, ala and 3 more, each worth 3 points in Scrabble.
27 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in alas plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in alas and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
alas is in the NWL, the official Scrabble word list for North America, and in the Words With Friends dictionary, so it's playable exactly as it stands and needs no unscrambling.
The 1-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record one sense for alas. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
alas is one of two four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing alas unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are aals and alas, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from alas earns more points in Scrabble. Words With Friends prices the same letters differently, so the top of the list changes on a Words With Friends board. Both scores count tile values only and exclude premium squares.
The letters in alas produce 12 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 four-letter words, 6 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.