Hidden inside inert sit inert, inter, niter and 2 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 33 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
inert, inter, niter and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from inert at 5 points. The top 10 of 33 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 five-letter words hiding in inert: four come from rearranging its letters, and inert 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 inert, inter, niter and 2 more, each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
42 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in inert plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in inert 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.
inert 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 three senses for inert. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
inert is one of five five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing inert unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are inert, inter, niter, nitre, and trine, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from inert 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 inert produce 33 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 five-letter words, 9 four-letter words, 10 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.