Hidden inside idle sit deil, deli, diel and 2 others, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 17 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
deil, deli, diel and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from idle at 5 points. The top 10 of 17 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 four-letter words hiding in idle: four come from rearranging its letters, and idle itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with deli and lied. For points, 5 words tie at 5 points, including deli, lied and deil.
34 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in idle plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in idle and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
idle 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 ten senses for idle. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
idle is one of five four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing idle unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are deil, deli, diel, idle, and lied, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from idle 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 idle produce 17 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 four-letter words, 7 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.