Hidden inside curses sit cruses, curses, cusser and 1 other, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 49 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
cruses, curses, cusser and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from curses at 8 points. The top 10 of 49 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 six-letter words hiding in curses: three come from rearranging its letters, and curses itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with curses. For points, the strongest plays are cruses, curses, cusser, and sucres — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 9 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in curses. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cures and curse. For points, 6 words tie at 7 points, including cures, curse and cress.
Rearranging the letters in curses produces 18 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cues, cure and sues. For points, 10 words tie at 6 points, including cues, cure and cess.
20 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in curses plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in curses and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
curses 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.
curses is one of four six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing curses unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cruses, curses, cusser, and sucres, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from curses 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 curses produce 49 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 six-letter words, 9 five-letter words, 18 four-letter words, 14 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.