Hidden inside gusto sit gouts and gusto, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 24 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
gouts and gusto tie for the highest Scrabble score from gusto at 6 points. The top 10 of 24 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in gusto: one comes from rearranging its letters, and gusto itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are gouts and gusto, each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in gusto 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.
gusto 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 one sense for gusto. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
gusto is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing gusto unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are gouts and gusto, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from gusto 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 gusto produce 24 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 7 four-letter words, 9 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.