Hidden inside bairn sit bairn and brain, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 7 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 34 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
bairn and brain tie for the highest Scrabble score from bairn at 7 points. The top 10 of 34 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in bairn: one comes from rearranging its letters, and bairn itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with brain. For points, the strongest plays are bairn and brain — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in bairn 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.
bairn 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 bairn. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 7 points on a Scrabble board:
bairn is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing bairn unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are bairn and brain, worth 7 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from bairn 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 bairn produce 34 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 9 four-letter words, 15 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.