ceil and lice tie for the highest Scrabble score from lice at 6 points. The top 8 of 8 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 four-letter words hiding in lice: one comes from rearranging its letters, and lice itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lice. For points, the strongest plays are ceil and lice — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in lice 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.
lice 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.
lice is one of two four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lice unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ceil and lice, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lice 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 lice produce 8 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 four-letter words, 4 three-letter words and 2 two-letter words.