Hidden inside cate sit cate and tace, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 16 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
cate and tace tie for the highest Scrabble score from cate at 6 points. The top 10 of 16 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 four-letter words hiding in cate: one comes from rearranging its letters, and cate itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are cate and tace, each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
27 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in cate plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in cate 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.
cate 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 1-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
cate is one of two four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing cate unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cate and tace, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from cate 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 cate produce 16 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 four-letter words, 9 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.