Hidden inside animal 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.
Unscramble NIALMA, ALAMNI or MIALAN and you get the same 6 letters as ANIMAL: so the words from ANIMAL listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
animal, lamina, and manila tie for the highest Scrabble score from animal 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 animal: two come from rearranging its letters, and animal 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 animal. 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 animal 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 animal. 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 animal 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.
animal 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 animal. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
animal is one of three six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing animal 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 animal 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 animal 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.