Hidden inside alumna sit alumna and manual, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 39 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
alumna and manual tie for the highest Scrabble score from alumna at 8 points. The top 10 of 39 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in alumna: one comes from rearranging its letters, and alumna itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are alumna and manual, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in alumna produces 13 valid four-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are alma, alum, lama and 4 more, each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
There are 11 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in alumna. If a familiar word is all you need, start with am, an, and um. For points, the strongest plays are am, ma, mu, and um — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
4 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in alumna plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in alumna 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.
alumna 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 4-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 alumna. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
alumna is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing alumna unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are alumna and manual, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from alumna 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 alumna produce 39 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 2 five-letter words, 13 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 11 two-letter words.