Hidden inside lats sit alts, last, lats and 2 others, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 18 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
alts, last, lats and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from lats at 4 points. The top 10 of 18 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 four-letter words hiding in lats: four come from rearranging its letters, and lats itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with last and salt. For points, 5 words tie at 4 points, including last, salt and alts.
45 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in lats plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in lats 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.
lats 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 lats. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
lats is one of five four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lats unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are alts, last, lats, salt, and slat, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lats 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 lats produce 18 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 four-letter words, 8 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.