flue and fuel tie for the highest Scrabble score from fuel at 7 points. The top 9 of 9 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 four-letter words hiding in fuel: one comes from rearranging its letters, and fuel itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are flue and fuel, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
There are 3 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in fuel. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are ef and fe, each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in fuel and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
fuel 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 2-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record five senses for fuel. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 7 points on a Scrabble board:
fuel is one of two four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing fuel unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are flue and fuel, worth 7 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from fuel 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 fuel produce 9 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 four-letter words, 4 three-letter words and 3 two-letter words.