Hidden inside karma sit karma, makar, and marka, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 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.
karma, makar, and marka tie for the highest Scrabble score from karma at 11 points. The top 10 of 17 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 five-letter words hiding in karma: two come from rearranging its letters, and karma itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with karma. For points, the strongest plays are karma, makar, and marka — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in karma 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.
karma 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 one sense for karma. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
karma is one of three five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing karma unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are karma, makar, and marka, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from karma 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 karma produce 17 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 five-letter words, 4 four-letter words, 5 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.