Hidden inside elbowing sit boweling and elbowing, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 14 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 158 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
boweling and elbowing tie for the highest Scrabble score from elbowing at 14 points. The top 10 of 158 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in elbowing: one comes from rearranging its letters, and elbowing 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 boweling and elbowing, each worth 14 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in elbowing produces 4 valid seven-letter words. Here the everyday answers and the top-scoring plays are one and the same: blowing and bowling, worth 13 points apiece in Scrabble.
Unscrambling elbowing turns up 12 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with belong. For points, the strongest plays are bowing, bowleg, and weblog — each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
There are 26 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in elbowing. If a familiar word is all you need, start with begin, being and below. For points, the strongest play is bewig — worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in elbowing produces 47 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with blew, blog and blow. For points, the strongest plays are blew, blow, bowl, and newb — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling elbowing turns up 48 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with beg, big and bow. For points, the strongest plays are bow and web — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 19 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in elbowing. If a familiar word is all you need, start with be, ew and go. For points, the strongest plays are ew, ow, we, and wo — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
4 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in elbowing plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in elbowing 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.
elbowing 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 4-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record one sense for elbowing. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 14 points on a Scrabble board:
elbowing is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing elbowing unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are boweling and elbowing, worth 14 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from elbowing 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 elbowing produce 158 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 4 seven-letter words, 12 six-letter words, 26 five-letter words, 47 four-letter words, 48 three-letter words and 19 two-letter words.