ape and pea tie for the highest Scrabble score from ape at 5 points. The top 5 of 5 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 three-letter words hiding in ape: one comes from rearranging its letters, and ape itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. Here the everyday answers and the top-scoring plays are one and the same: ape and pea, worth 5 points apiece in Scrabble.
35 four-letter words can be made using all the letters in ape plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in ape and you get a different three-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 2 of the 3 letters, not all of them.
ape 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 five senses for ape. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
ape is one of two three-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing ape unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ape and pea, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from ape 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 ape produce 5 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 three-letter words and 3 two-letter words.