Hidden inside curate sit acuter and curate, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 72 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
acuter and curate tie for the highest Scrabble score from curate at 8 points. The top 10 of 72 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in curate: one comes from rearranging its letters, and curate 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 acuter and curate, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 15 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in curate. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cater, cuter, and react. For points, 14 words tie at 7 points, including cater, cuter and react.
Rearranging the letters in curate produces 16 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with care, cart and cure. For points, 11 words tie at 6 points, including care, cart and cure.
Unscrambling curate turns up 30 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with act, are and art. For points, 12 words tie at 5 points, including act, car and cat.
13 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in curate plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in curate 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.
curate 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 one sense for curate. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
curate is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing curate unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are acuter and curate, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from curate 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 curate produce 72 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 15 five-letter words, 16 four-letter words, 30 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.