Hidden inside carton sit cantor, carton, contra and 1 other, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 70 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble RTACNO, OCTRAN or TRACNO and you get the same 6 letters as CARTON: so the words from CARTON listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
cantor, carton, contra and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from carton at 8 points. The top 10 of 70 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 six-letter words hiding in carton: three come from rearranging its letters, and carton itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with carton. For points, the strongest plays are cantor, carton, contra, and craton — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 9 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in carton. If a familiar word is all you need, start with actor. For points, 8 words tie at 7 points, including actor, acorn and canto.
Rearranging the letters in carton produces 20 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cart, coat and corn. For points, 11 words tie at 6 points, including cart, coat and corn.
Unscrambling carton turns up 28 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with act, ant and art. For points, 11 words tie at 5 points, including act, can and car.
Swap a single tile in carton 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.
carton 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 carton. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
carton is one of four six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing carton unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cantor, carton, contra, and craton, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from carton 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 carton produce 70 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 six-letter words, 9 five-letter words, 20 four-letter words, 28 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.