Hidden inside idols sit diols, idols, lidos and 4 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 42 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
diols, idols, lidos and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from idols at 6 points. The top 10 of 42 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 7 five-letter words hiding in idols: six come from rearranging its letters, and idols itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with solid. For points, 7 words tie at 6 points, including solid, diols and idols.
Rearranging the letters in idols produces 14 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lids, oils and slid. For points, 10 words tie at 5 points, including lids, slid and sold.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in idols. If a familiar word is all you need, start with do, id, is, and so. For points, the strongest plays are do, id, and od — each worth 3 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in idols and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
idols 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 three senses for idols. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
idols is one of seven five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing idols unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are diols, idols, lidos, loids, sloid, soldi, and solid, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from idols 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 idols produce 42 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 five-letter words, 14 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.