Hidden inside stars sit stars, trass, and tsars, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 22 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble TSSRA, SSART or TRSAS and you get the same 5 letters as STARS: so the words from STARS listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
stars, trass, and tsars tie for the highest Scrabble score from stars at 5 points. The top 10 of 22 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 five-letter words hiding in stars: two come from rearranging its letters, and stars itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with stars. For points, the strongest plays are stars, trass, and tsars — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
23 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in stars plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in stars 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.
stars 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 stars carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record twelve senses for stars. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
stars is one of three five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing stars unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are stars, trass, and tsars, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from stars 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 stars produce 22 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 five-letter words, 6 four-letter words, 9 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.