Hidden inside mains sit amins, mains, manis and 1 other, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 7 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 41 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
amins, mains, manis and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from mains at 7 points. The top 10 of 41 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 five-letter words hiding in mains: three come from rearranging its letters, and mains itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are amins, mains, manis, and minas, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in mains produces 12 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with aims and main. For points, 9 words tie at 6 points, including aims, main and amin.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in mains. If a familiar word is all you need, start with am, an and as. For points, the strongest plays are am, ma, and mi — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
27 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in mains plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in mains and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
mains 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 2-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
mains is one of four five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing mains unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are amins, mains, manis, and minas, worth 7 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from mains 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 mains produce 41 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 five-letter words, 12 four-letter words, 15 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.