Hidden inside banshees sit banshees and shebeans, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 13 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 110 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
banshees and shebeans tie for the highest Scrabble score from banshees at 13 points. The top 10 of 110 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in banshees: one comes from rearranging its letters, and banshees itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are banshees and shebeans, each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in banshees produces 2 valid seven-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are banshee and shebean, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
There are 19 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in banshees. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ashes, bases and beans. For points, 6 words tie at 8 points, including ashes, ashen and hanse.
Rearranging the letters in banshees produces 37 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with bans, base and bass. For points, the strongest play is bash — worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling banshees turns up 31 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ash, ass and bah. For points, the strongest play is bah — worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 15 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in banshees. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ah, an and as. For points, 5 words tie at 5 points, including ah, eh and ha.
Swap a single tile in banshees and you get a different eight-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 7 of the 8 letters, not all of them.
banshees 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 one sense for banshees. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 13 points on a Scrabble board:
banshees is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing banshees unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are banshees and shebeans, worth 13 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from banshees 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 banshees produce 110 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 2 seven-letter words, 4 six-letter words, 19 five-letter words, 37 four-letter words, 31 three-letter words and 15 two-letter words.