Hidden inside illicit sit illicit and illitic, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 13 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
illicit and illitic tie for the highest Scrabble score from illicit at 9 points. The top 10 of 13 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in illicit: one comes from rearranging its letters, and illicit itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are illicit and illitic, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling illicit produces exactly one five-letter word: licit. It is not one of the common answers — a genuine unscrambler find — and it banks 7 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in illicit and you get a different seven-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 6 of the 7 letters, not all of them.
illicit 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.
Dictionaries record two senses for illicit. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
illicit is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing illicit unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are illicit and illitic, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from illicit 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 illicit produce 13 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 1 five-letter word, 3 four-letter words, 4 three-letter words and 3 two-letter words.