Hidden inside lain sit anil, lain, and nail, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 15 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
anil, lain, and nail tie for the highest Scrabble score from lain at 4 points. The top 10 of 15 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 four-letter words hiding in lain: two come from rearranging its letters, and lain itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with nail. For points, the strongest plays are anil, lain, and nail — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
30 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in lain plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in lain 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.
lain 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 2-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
lain is one of three four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lain unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are anil, lain, and nail, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lain 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 lain produce 15 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 four-letter words, 5 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.