Hidden inside hanker sit hanker and harken, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 13 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 51 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
hanker and harken tie for the highest Scrabble score from hanker at 13 points. The top 10 of 51 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in hanker: one comes from rearranging its letters, and hanker itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are hanker and harken, each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in hanker produces 20 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with earn, hear, and near. For points, 5 words tie at 11 points, including ankh, hake and hank.
Unscrambling hanker turns up 16 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with are, ear and era. For points, the strongest plays are ark, kae, kea, and ken — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
There are 13 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in hanker. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ah, an and eh. For points, the strongest play is ka — worth 6 points in Scrabble.
4 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in hanker plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in hanker 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.
hanker 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 hanker carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record one sense for hanker. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 13 points on a Scrabble board:
hanker is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing hanker unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are hanker and harken, worth 13 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from hanker 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 hanker produce 51 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 20 four-letter words, 16 three-letter words and 13 two-letter words.