Hidden inside deer sit deer, dere, dree and 2 others, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 13 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble ERDE or EDER and you get the same 4 letters as DEER: so the words from DEER listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
deer, dere, dree and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from deer at 5 points. The top 10 of 13 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 four-letter words hiding in deer: four come from rearranging its letters, and deer itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with deer. For points, 5 words tie at 5 points, including deer, dere and dree.
There are 4 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in deer. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are de and ed, each worth 3 points in Scrabble.
32 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in deer plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in deer and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
deer 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 deer carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record one sense for deer. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
deer is one of five four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing deer unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are deer, dere, dree, rede, and reed, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from deer 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 deer produce 13 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 four-letter words, 4 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.