Hidden inside aliens sit aliens, alines, elains and 3 others, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 95 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
aliens, alines, elains and 4 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from aliens at 6 points. The top 10 of 95 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 6 six-letter words hiding in aliens: five come from rearranging its letters, and aliens itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with aliens. For points, 6 words tie at 6 points, including aliens, alines and elains.
There are 17 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in aliens. If a familiar word is all you need, start with aisle, alien and lanes. For points, 17 words tie at 5 points, including aisle, alien and lanes.
Rearranging the letters in aliens produces 31 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lane, lean and lies. For points, 31 words tie at 4 points, including lane, lean and lies.
Unscrambling aliens turns up 26 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lie, sea, and sin. For points, 26 words tie at 3 points, including lie, sea and sin.
There are 15 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in aliens. If a familiar word is all you need, start with an, as, in, and is. For points, 15 words tie at 2 points, including an, as and in.
40 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in aliens plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in aliens and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
aliens 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 2-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record six senses for aliens. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
aliens is one of six six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing aliens unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are aliens, alines, elains, lianes, saline, and silane, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from aliens 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 aliens produce 95 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 6 six-letter words, 17 five-letter words, 31 four-letter words, 26 three-letter words and 15 two-letter words.