Hidden inside manila sit animal, lamina, and manila, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 55 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
animal, lamina, and manila tie for the highest Scrabble score from manila at 8 points. The top 10 of 55 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 six-letter words hiding in manila: two come from rearranging its letters, and manila itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with animal. For points, the strongest plays are animal, lamina, and manila — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 8 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in manila. 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 3 more, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in manila produces 17 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with mail, main, and nail. For points, 11 words tie at 6 points, including mail, main and alma.
There are 11 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in manila. If a familiar word is all you need, start with am, an, and in. For points, the strongest plays are am, ma, and mi — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in manila and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
manila 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 manila. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
manila is one of three six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing manila unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are animal, lamina, and manila, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from manila 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 manila produce 55 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 six-letter words, 8 five-letter words, 17 four-letter words, 16 three-letter words and 11 two-letter words.