Hidden inside midges sit midges and smidge, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 59 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
midges and smidge tie for the highest Scrabble score from midges at 10 points. The top 10 of 59 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in midges: one comes from rearranging its letters, and midges itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are midges and smidge, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in midges produces 20 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dies, digs, dime, and side. For points, 8 words tie at 7 points, including dime, dims and gems.
Unscrambling midges turns up 23 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with die, dig, and ids. For points, 6 words tie at 6 points, including dim, gem and med.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in midges. If a familiar word is all you need, start with id, is, and me. For points, the strongest plays are em, me, and mi — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
5 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in midges plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in midges 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.
midges 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.
Dictionaries record one sense for midges. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
midges is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing midges unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are midges and smidge, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from midges 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 midges produce 59 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 4 five-letter words, 20 four-letter words, 23 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.