Hidden inside licenses sit licenses and silences, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 113 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
licenses and silences tie for the highest Scrabble score from licenses at 10 points. The top 10 of 113 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in licenses: one comes from rearranging its letters, and licenses itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. Here the everyday answers and the top-scoring plays are one and the same: licenses and silences, worth 10 points apiece in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in licenses produces 7 valid seven-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with license and silence. For points, the strongest plays are iceless, license, selenic, and silence — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling licenses turns up 14 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with nieces, scenes, and slices. For points, 7 words tie at 8 points, including nieces, scenes and slices.
There are 23 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in licenses. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lines, niece and scene. For points, 10 words tie at 7 points, including niece, scene and since.
Rearranging the letters in licenses produces 35 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with else, ices and less. For points, 11 words tie at 6 points, including ices, lice and nice.
Unscrambling licenses turns up 24 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ice, lie, see, and sin. For points, 6 words tie at 5 points, including ice, cee and cel.
4 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in licenses plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in licenses 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.
licenses 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 five senses for licenses. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
licenses is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing licenses unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are licenses and silences, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from licenses 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 licenses produce 113 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 7 seven-letter words, 14 six-letter words, 23 five-letter words, 35 four-letter words, 24 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.