Hidden inside eta sit ate, eat, eta and 2 others, three-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 3 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 10 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
ate, eat, eta and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from eta at 3 points. The top 10 of 10 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 three-letter words hiding in eta: four come from rearranging its letters, and eta itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ate, eat, and tea. For points, 5 words tie at 3 points, including ate, eat and tea.
55 four-letter words can be made using all the letters in eta plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in eta and you get a different three-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 2 of the 3 letters, not all of them.
eta 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 eta carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record two senses for eta. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 3 points on a Scrabble board:
eta is one of five three-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing eta unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ate, eat, eta, tae, and tea, worth 3 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from eta 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 eta produce 10 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.