Hidden inside hotel sit helot, hotel, and thole, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 29 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble OTHEL, LEOTH or OLHET and you get the same 5 letters as HOTEL: so the words from HOTEL listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
helot, hotel, and thole tie for the highest Scrabble score from hotel at 8 points. The top 10 of 29 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 five-letter words hiding in hotel: two come from rearranging its letters, and hotel itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hotel. For points, the strongest plays are helot, hotel, and thole — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in hotel. If a familiar word is all you need, start with eh, he and ho. For points, the strongest plays are eh, he, ho, and oh — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in hotel 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.
hotel 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 hotel carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record one sense for hotel. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
hotel is one of three five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing hotel unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are helot, hotel, and thole, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from hotel 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 hotel produce 29 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 five-letter words, 5 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.