Hidden inside viola sit viola and voila, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 18 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble OVIAL, VALIO or AVOLI and you get the same 5 letters as VIOLA: so the words from VIOLA listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
viola and voila tie for the highest Scrabble score from viola at 8 points. The top 10 of 18 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in viola: one comes from rearranging its letters, and viola 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 viola and voila, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in viola produces 4 valid four-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are oval, vail, vial, and viol, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
There are 6 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in viola. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are ai, al, la and 3 more, each worth 2 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in viola 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.
viola 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 three senses for viola. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
viola is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing viola unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are viola and voila, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from viola 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 viola produce 18 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 4 four-letter words, 6 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.