Hidden inside bran sit barn and bran, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 13 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
barn and bran tie for the highest Scrabble score from bran at 6 points. The top 10 of 13 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 four-letter words hiding in bran: one comes from rearranging its letters, and bran itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with barn. For points, the strongest plays are barn and bran — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in bran and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
bran 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 two senses for bran. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
bran is one of two four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing bran unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are barn and bran, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from bran 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 bran produce 13 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 four-letter words, 6 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.