Hidden inside maintain sit amanitin and maintain, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 64 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
amanitin and maintain tie for the highest Scrabble score from maintain at 10 points. The top 10 of 64 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in maintain: one comes from rearranging its letters, and maintain itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with maintain. For points, the strongest plays are amanitin and maintain — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in maintain produces 2 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 animati and antiman, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
There are 10 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in maintain. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are amain, amnia, anima and 7 more, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in maintain produces 18 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with main and mint. For points, 9 words tie at 6 points, including main, mint and amia.
Unscrambling maintain turns up 18 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with aim, ant and man. For points, 8 words tie at 5 points, including aim, man and ama.
There are 12 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in maintain. If a familiar word is all you need, start with am, an and at. For points, the strongest plays are am, ma, and mi — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
5 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in maintain plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in maintain 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.
maintain 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 ten senses for maintain. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
maintain is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing maintain unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are amanitin and maintain, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from maintain 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 maintain produce 64 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 2 seven-letter words, 2 six-letter words, 10 five-letter words, 18 four-letter words, 18 three-letter words and 12 two-letter words.