Hidden inside bulges sit bugles and bulges, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 44 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
bugles and bulges tie for the highest Scrabble score from bulges at 9 points. The top 10 of 44 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in bulges: one comes from rearranging its letters, and bulges itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are bugles and bulges, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
There are 7 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in bulges. If a familiar word is all you need, start with blues and glues. For points, the strongest plays are bugle and bulge — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in bulges produces 15 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with begs, blue and bugs. For points, the strongest plays are begs and bugs — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling bulges turns up 16 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with beg, bug and bus. For points, the strongest plays are beg and bug — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
9 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in bulges plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in bulges 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.
bulges 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 4-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record five senses for bulges. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
bulges is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing bulges unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are bugles and bulges, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from bulges 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 bulges produce 44 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 7 five-letter words, 15 four-letter words, 16 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.