Hidden inside cavalier sit cavalier and variceal, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 13 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 164 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
cavalier and variceal tie for the highest Scrabble score from cavalier at 13 points. The top 10 of 164 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in cavalier: one comes from rearranging its letters, and cavalier itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are cavalier and variceal, each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in cavalier produces 8 valid seven-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are avarice, caravel, caviare and 3 more, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling cavalier turns up 11 six-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are airvac, carvel, caviar, and claver, each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 41 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in cavalier. If a familiar word is all you need, start with alive, carve and clear. For points, 10 words tie at 10 points, including carve, calve and caver.
Rearranging the letters in cavalier produces 59 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with area, care and cave. For points, the strongest plays are cava, cave, and vice — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling cavalier turns up 33 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with air, are and car. For points, the strongest play is vac — worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in cavalier. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are aa, ae, ai and 7 more, each worth 2 points in Scrabble.
5 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in cavalier plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in cavalier and you get a different eight-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 7 of the 8 letters, not all of them.
cavalier 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 3-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 cavalier. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 13 points on a Scrabble board:
cavalier is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing cavalier unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cavalier and variceal, worth 13 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from cavalier 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 cavalier produce 164 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 8 seven-letter words, 11 six-letter words, 41 five-letter words, 59 four-letter words, 33 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.