Hidden inside cowherds sit chowders and cowherds, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 17 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 253 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
chowders and cowherds tie for the highest Scrabble score from cowherds at 17 points. The top 10 of 253 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in cowherds: one comes from rearranging its letters, and cowherds 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 chowders and cowherds, each worth 17 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in cowherds produces 5 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 chowder, chowsed, cowherd, and cowshed, each worth 16 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling cowherds turns up 34 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with chores, crowds and scored. For points, the strongest play is chowed — worth 15 points in Scrabble.
There are 66 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in cowherds. If a familiar word is all you need, start with chews, chore and chose. For points, the strongest plays are chews and chows — each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in cowherds produces 73 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with chew, code and cord. For points, the strongest plays are chew and chow — each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling cowherds turns up 53 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cow, her and how. For points, the strongest plays are hew, how, and who — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
There are 20 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in cowherds. If a familiar word is all you need, start with do, eh and ew. For points, 9 words tie at 5 points, including eh, ew and he.
Swap a single tile in cowherds 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.
cowherds 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.
Both totals match, because every tile in cowherds carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record one sense for cowherds. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 17 points on a Scrabble board:
cowherds is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing cowherds unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are chowders and cowherds, worth 17 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from cowherds 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 cowherds produce 253 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 5 seven-letter words, 34 six-letter words, 66 five-letter words, 73 four-letter words, 53 three-letter words and 20 two-letter words.