Hidden inside drive sit diver, drive, and rived, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 26 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble EDRIV, DRVEI or IRVED and you get the same 5 letters as DRIVE: so the words from DRIVE listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
diver, drive, and rived tie for the highest Scrabble score from drive at 9 points. The top 10 of 26 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 five-letter words hiding in drive: two come from rearranging its letters, and drive itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with drive. For points, the strongest plays are diver, drive, and rived — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in drive produces 9 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dive and ride. For points, the strongest plays are devi, dive, vide, and vied — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in drive and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
drive 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 1-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record thirty-four senses for drive. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
drive is one of three five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing drive unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are diver, drive, and rived, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from drive 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 drive produce 26 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 five-letter words, 9 four-letter words, 9 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.