Hidden inside coattails sit coattails and tailcoats, nine-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 234 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
coattails and tailcoats tie for the highest Scrabble score from coattails at 11 points. The top 10 of 234 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 nine-letter words hiding in coattails: one comes from rearranging its letters, and coattails itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these nine-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are coattails and tailcoats, each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 5 eight-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in coattails. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are cattails, cattalos, coattail and 2 more, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in coattails produces 10 valid seven-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are asocial, astatic, catalos and 5 more, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling coattails turns up 16 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with attics and social. For points, 13 words tie at 8 points, including attics, social and casita.
There are 53 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in coattails. If a familiar word is all you need, start with attic, coast and coats. For points, 29 words tie at 7 points, including attic, coast and coats.
Rearranging the letters in coattails produces 87 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with acts, also and cast. For points, 35 words tie at 6 points, including acts, cast and cats.
Unscrambling coattails turns up 44 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with act, cat and its. For points, 14 words tie at 5 points, including act, cat and cal.
There are 17 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in coattails. If a familiar word is all you need, start with as, at and is. For points, 17 words tie at 2 points, including as, at and is.
1 ten-letter word can be made using all the letters in coattails plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in coattails and you get a different nine-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 8 of the 9 letters, not all of them.
coattails 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 one sense for coattails. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
coattails is one of two nine-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing coattails unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are coattails and tailcoats, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from coattails 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 coattails produce 234 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 nine-letter words, 5 eight-letter words, 10 seven-letter words, 16 six-letter words, 53 five-letter words, 87 four-letter words, 44 three-letter words and 17 two-letter words.