Hidden inside imaum sit imaum and umami, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 19 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
imaum and umami tie for the highest Scrabble score from imaum at 9 points. The top 10 of 19 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in imaum: one comes from rearranging its letters, and imaum 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 imaum and umami, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in imaum produces 3 valid four-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are imam, maim, and umma, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in imaum 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.
imaum 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 one sense for imaum. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
imaum is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing imaum unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are imaum and umami, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from imaum 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 imaum produce 19 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 3 four-letter words, 7 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.