Hidden inside anal sit alan, anal, and nala, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 11 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
alan, anal, and nala tie for the highest Scrabble score from anal at 4 points. The top 10 of 11 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 four-letter words hiding in anal: two come from rearranging its letters, and anal 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 alan, anal, and nala, each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in anal 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.
anal 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 two senses for anal. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
anal is one of three four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing anal unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are alan, anal, and nala, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from anal 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 anal produce 11 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 four-letter words, 3 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.