Hidden inside colanders sit colanders and conelrads, nine-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 12 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 711 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
colanders and conelrads tie for the highest Scrabble score from colanders at 12 points. The top 10 of 711 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 nine-letter words hiding in colanders: one comes from rearranging its letters, and colanders 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 colanders and conelrads, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
There are 8 eight-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in colanders. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are caldrons, candlers, celadons and 3 more, each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in colanders produces 48 valid seven-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with candles and dancers. For points, 19 words tie at 10 points, including candles, dancers and acnodes.
Unscrambling colanders turns up 133 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with adores, candle and cleans. For points, 37 words tie at 9 points, including candle, closed and colder.
There are 209 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in colanders. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cards, cared and cares. For points, 39 words tie at 8 points, including cards, cared and codes.
Rearranging the letters in colanders produces 192 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with also, cans and card. For points, 17 words tie at 7 points, including card, code and cold.
Unscrambling colanders turns up 93 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ads, and and are. For points, the strongest plays are cad, cod, and doc — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
There are 26 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in colanders. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ad, an and as. For points, 6 words tie at 3 points, including ad, do and da.
2 ten-letter words can be made using all the letters in colanders plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in colanders 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.
colanders 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 colanders. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
colanders is one of two nine-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing colanders unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are colanders and conelrads, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from colanders 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 colanders produce 711 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 nine-letter words, 8 eight-letter words, 48 seven-letter words, 133 six-letter words, 209 five-letter words, 192 four-letter words, 93 three-letter words and 26 two-letter words.