Hidden inside inches sit chines, chinse, inches and 1 other, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 54 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
chines, chinse, inches and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from inches at 11 points. The top 10 of 54 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 six-letter words hiding in inches: three come from rearranging its letters, and inches itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with inches. For points, the strongest plays are chines, chinse, inches, and niches — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 6 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in inches. If a familiar word is all you need, start with chins, shine, and since. For points, the strongest plays are chine, chins, and niche — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in inches produces 16 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with chin, hens and ices. For points, the strongest plays are chin, chis, ichs, and inch — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling inches turns up 18 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hen, his and ice. For points, the strongest plays are chi, hic, and ich — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in inches. If a familiar word is all you need, start with eh, he and hi. For points, the strongest plays are eh, he, hi, and sh — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
18 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in inches plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in inches and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
inches 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 1-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record three senses for inches. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
inches is one of four six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing inches unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are chines, chinse, inches, and niches, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from inches 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 inches produce 54 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 six-letter words, 6 five-letter words, 16 four-letter words, 18 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.