cal and lac tie for the highest Scrabble score from cal at 5 points. The top 4 of 4 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 three-letter words hiding in cal: one comes from rearranging its letters, and cal itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these three-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are cal and lac, each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in cal and you get a different three-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 2 of the 3 letters, not all of them.
cal is in the NWL, the official Scrabble word list for North America, but not in the Words With Friends dictionary, so it plays in Scrabble only.
cal is one of two three-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing cal unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cal and lac, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from cal 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 cal produce 4 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 three-letter words and 2 two-letter words.