Hidden inside cursives sit cursives and scurvies, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 13 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 124 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
cursives and scurvies tie for the highest Scrabble score from cursives at 13 points. The top 10 of 124 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in cursives: one comes from rearranging its letters, and cursives 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 cursives and scurvies, each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in cursives produces 4 valid seven-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cruises and viruses. For points, the strongest plays are cursive and scrives — each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling cursives turns up 16 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with crises, cruise, curses, and versus. For points, the strongest plays are curves, scrive, and viscus — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 29 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in cursives. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cries, cures and curse. For points, the strongest plays are curve and vices — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in cursives produces 40 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cues, cure and ices. For points, the strongest play is vice — worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling cursives turns up 27 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cue, ice and sir. For points, the strongest plays are rev, sev, vie, and vis — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
2 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in cursives plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in cursives 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.
cursives 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 two senses for cursives. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 13 points on a Scrabble board:
cursives is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing cursives unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cursives and scurvies, worth 13 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from cursives 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 cursives produce 124 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 4 seven-letter words, 16 six-letter words, 29 five-letter words, 40 four-letter words, 27 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.