Hidden inside bulging sit bugling and bulging, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 42 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
bugling and bulging tie for the highest Scrabble score from bulging at 11 points. The top 10 of 42 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in bulging: one comes from rearranging its letters, and bulging itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are bugling and bulging, each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 2 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in bulging. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring word is bling, worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in bulging produces 8 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lung. For points, the strongest plays are bing, bung, and glib — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling bulging turns up 20 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with big, bug and bun. For points, the strongest plays are big, bug, and gib — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
4 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in bulging plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in bulging and you get a different seven-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 6 of the 7 letters, not all of them.
bulging 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 6-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 bulging. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
bulging is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing bulging unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are bugling and bulging, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from bulging 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 bulging produce 42 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 4 six-letter words, 2 five-letter words, 8 four-letter words, 20 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.