Hidden inside eater sit arete and eater, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 30 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
arete and eater tie for the highest Scrabble score from eater at 5 points. The top 10 of 30 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in eater: one comes from rearranging its letters, and eater itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are arete and eater, each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
38 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in eater plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in eater 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.
eater 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 eater carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record two senses for eater. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
eater is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing eater unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are arete and eater, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from eater 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 eater produce 30 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 5 four-letter words, 15 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.