Hidden inside departure sit apertured and departure, nine-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 12 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 245 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
apertured and departure tie for the highest Scrabble score from departure at 12 points. The top 10 of 245 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 nine-letter words hiding in departure: one comes from rearranging its letters, and departure 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 apertured and departure, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
There are 4 eight-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in departure. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are depurate, raptured, and upreared, each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in departure produces 14 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 adepter, erupted, perdure and 6 more, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling departure turns up 43 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dearer, repeat, retard, and update. For points, 15 words tie at 9 points, including update, depart and depute.
There are 56 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in departure. If a familiar word is all you need, start with purer, ruder and taped. For points, 14 words tie at 8 points, including taped, adept and drape.
Rearranging the letters in departure produces 60 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dare, date and dear. For points, 5 words tie at 7 points, including deep, peed and aped.
Unscrambling departure turns up 50 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ape, are and art. For points, 6 words tie at 6 points, including pad, dap and dep.
There are 16 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in departure. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ad, at, and up. For points, the strongest plays are pa, pe, and up — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
3 ten-letter words can be made using all the letters in departure plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in departure 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.
departure 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.
Dictionaries record three senses for departure. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
departure is one of two nine-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing departure unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are apertured and departure, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from departure 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 departure produce 245 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 nine-letter words, 4 eight-letter words, 14 seven-letter words, 43 six-letter words, 56 five-letter words, 60 four-letter words, 50 three-letter words and 16 two-letter words.