gouged needs no unscrambling at all — the six-letter word is already the strongest play its own letters allow, banking 9 points in Scrabble as it stands. In all, 22 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
gouged is the highest-scoring word from gouged, worth 9 points in Scrabble. The top 10 of 22 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
Only one six-letter word uses the letters in gouged — and it is gouged itself. No unscrambling is needed: the word is already playable as written, worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling gouged produces exactly one five-letter word: gouge. It is not one of the common answers — a genuine unscrambler find — and it banks 7 points in Scrabble.
1 seven-letter word can be made using all the letters in gouged plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in gouged 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.
gouged 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 3-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
gouged is the only six-letter word the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing gouged unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring play from these letters is gouged, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and no other word from gouged 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 gouged produce 22 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 1 six-letter word, 1 five-letter word, 2 four-letter words, 12 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.