Hidden inside lonesome sit lonesome and oenomels, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 137 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
lonesome and oenomels tie for the highest Scrabble score from lonesome at 10 points. The top 10 of 137 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in lonesome: one comes from rearranging its letters, and lonesome 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 lonesome and oenomels, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling lonesome turns up 6 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lemons, loosen, and melons. For points, the strongest plays are lemons, melons, osmole, and solemn — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 31 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in lonesome. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lemon, loose and melon. For points, 18 words tie at 7 points, including lemon, melon and moles.
Rearranging the letters in lonesome produces 48 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with else, lose and mole. For points, 20 words tie at 6 points, including mole, moon and moos.
Unscrambling lonesome turns up 34 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with men, moo and one. For points, 14 words tie at 5 points, including men, moo and elm.
There are 14 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in lonesome. If a familiar word is all you need, start with me, no, on, and so. For points, the strongest plays are em, me, mo, and om — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
3 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in lonesome plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in lonesome 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.
lonesome 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 two senses for lonesome. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
lonesome is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lonesome unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are lonesome and oenomels, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lonesome 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 lonesome produce 137 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 2 seven-letter words, 6 six-letter words, 31 five-letter words, 48 four-letter words, 34 three-letter words and 14 two-letter words.