Hidden inside colander sit colander and conelrad, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 302 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
colander and conelrad tie for the highest Scrabble score from colander at 11 points. The top 10 of 302 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in colander: one comes from rearranging its letters, and colander itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are colander and conelrad, each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in colander produces 7 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 acorned, caldron, candler and 2 more, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling colander turns up 41 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with candle, colder, dancer, and loaned. For points, 20 words tie at 9 points, including candle, colder and dancer.
There are 74 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in colander. If a familiar word is all you need, start with adore, alone and cared. For points, 22 words tie at 8 points, including cared, dance and raced.
Rearranging the letters in colander produces 96 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with card, care and code. For points, 13 words tie at 7 points, including card, code and cold.
Unscrambling colander turns up 60 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with and, are and can. For points, the strongest plays are cad, cod, and doc — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
There are 22 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in colander. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ad, an and do. For points, 6 words tie at 3 points, including ad, do and da.
5 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in colander plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in colander and you get a different eight-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 7 of the 8 letters, not all of them.
colander 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 3-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 colander. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
colander is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing colander unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are colander and conelrad, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from colander 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 colander produce 302 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 7 seven-letter words, 41 six-letter words, 74 five-letter words, 96 four-letter words, 60 three-letter words and 22 two-letter words.