Hidden inside alarms sit alarms and malars, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 49 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble SALARM, SLARAM or SARLMA and you get the same 6 letters as ALARMS: so the words from ALARMS listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
alarms and malars tie for the highest Scrabble score from alarms at 8 points. The top 10 of 49 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in alarms: one comes from rearranging its letters, and alarms itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with alarms. For points, the strongest plays are alarms and malars — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 8 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in alarms. If a familiar word is all you need, start with alarm. For points, 8 words tie at 7 points, including alarm, almas and lamas.
Rearranging the letters in alarms produces 17 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with arms and slam. For points, 13 words tie at 6 points, including arms, slam and alma.
4 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in alarms plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in alarms 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.
alarms 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 alarms. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
alarms is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing alarms unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are alarms and malars, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from alarms 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 alarms produce 49 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 8 five-letter words, 17 four-letter words, 15 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.