Hidden inside barest sit barest, baster, breast and 1 other, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 125 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
barest, baster, breast and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from barest at 8 points. The top 10 of 125 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 six-letter words hiding in barest: three come from rearranging its letters, and barest itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with barest and breast. For points, the strongest plays are barest, baster, breast, and tabers — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 22 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in barest. If a familiar word is all you need, start with bears, beast and beats. For points, 15 words tie at 7 points, including bears, beast and beats.
Rearranging the letters in barest produces 49 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with arts, bare and bars. For points, 21 words tie at 6 points, including bare, bars and base.
Unscrambling barest turns up 37 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with are, art and ate. For points, 12 words tie at 5 points, including bar, bat and bet.
There are 13 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in barest. If a familiar word is all you need, start with as, at, and be. For points, the strongest plays are ab, ba, and be — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
36 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in barest plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in barest 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.
barest 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.
barest is one of four six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing barest unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are barest, baster, breast, and tabers, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from barest 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 barest produce 125 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 six-letter words, 22 five-letter words, 49 four-letter words, 37 three-letter words and 13 two-letter words.