bun and nub tie for the highest Scrabble score from nub at 5 points. The top 4 of 4 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 three-letter words hiding in nub: one comes from rearranging its letters, and nub itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with bun. For points, the strongest plays are bun and nub — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
The words below are listed alphabetically. Scores count playable tiles only and leave out premium-square bonuses.
There are 2 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in nub. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are nu and un, each worth 2 points in Scrabble.
The full list follows, sorted A to Z; every score reflects tile constraints and skips board bonuses.
Swap a single tile in nub 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.
nub 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 three senses for nub. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
nub is one of two three-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing nub unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are bun and nub, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from nub 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 nub produce 4 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 three-letter words and 2 two-letter words.