Hidden inside lair sit aril, lair, lari and 4 others, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 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.
aril, lair, lari and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from lair at 4 points. The top 10 of 17 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 7 four-letter words hiding in lair: six come from rearranging its letters, and lair itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with liar. For points, 7 words tie at 4 points, including liar, aril and lair.
There are 5 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in lair. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are ai, al, ar and 2 more, each worth 2 points in Scrabble.
30 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in lair plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in lair 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.
lair 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 lair. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
lair is one of seven four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lair unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are aril, lair, lari, liar, lira, rail, and rial, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lair 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 lair produce 17 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 four-letter words, 5 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.