Hidden inside badly sit badly and baldy, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 26 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
badly and baldy tie for the highest Scrabble score from badly at 11 points. The top 10 of 26 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in badly: one comes from rearranging its letters, and badly itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with badly. For points, the strongest plays are badly and baldy — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in badly and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
badly 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 ten senses for badly. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
badly is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing badly unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are badly and baldy, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from badly 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 badly produce 26 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 4 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.