Hidden inside assess sit assess and sasses, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 12 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
assess and sasses tie for the highest Scrabble score from assess at 6 points. The top 10 of 12 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in assess: one comes from rearranging its letters, and assess 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 assess and sasses, each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling assess produces exactly one five-letter word: asses. It is an everyday word and an easy play, worth 5 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in assess 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.
assess 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.
Both totals match, because every tile in assess carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record four senses for assess. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
assess is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing assess unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are assess and sasses, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from assess 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 assess produce 12 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 1 five-letter word, 2 four-letter words, 4 three-letter words and 3 two-letter words.