man and nam tie for the highest Scrabble score from nam at 5 points. The top 6 of 6 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 three-letter words hiding in nam: one comes from rearranging its letters, and nam itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with man. For points, the strongest plays are man and nam — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in nam and you get a different three-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 2 of the 3 letters, not all of them.
nam 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.
nam is one of two three-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing nam unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are man and nam, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from nam 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 nam produce 6 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.