Hidden inside lily sit illy, lily, and yill, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 7 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 5 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
illy, lily, and yill tie for the highest Scrabble score from lily at 7 points. The top 5 of 5 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 four-letter words hiding in lily: two come from rearranging its letters, and lily itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are illy, lily, and yill, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Below, the list runs in alphabetical order, with each score based on the playable tile set — premium squares not included.
Unscrambling lily produces exactly one three-letter word: ill. It is an everyday word and an easy play, worth 3 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling lily produces exactly one two-letter word: li. It is not one of the common answers — a genuine unscrambler find — and it banks 2 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in lily 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.
lily 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 lily. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 7 points on a Scrabble board:
lily is one of three four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lily unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are illy, lily, and yill, worth 7 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lily 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 lily produce 5 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 four-letter words, 1 three-letter word and 1 two-letter word.