Hidden inside obscures sit bescours and obscures, eight-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 12 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 185 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
bescours and obscures tie for the highest Scrabble score from obscures at 12 points. The top 10 of 185 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 eight-letter words hiding in obscures: one comes from rearranging its letters, and obscures itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are bescours and obscures, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in obscures produces 6 valid seven-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with courses and sources. For points, the strongest plays are bescour and obscure — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling obscures turns up 26 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with course, curses and scores. For points, the strongest plays are cubers, scrobs, and scrubs — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
There are 42 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in obscures. If a familiar word is all you need, start with buses, cores and cross. For points, 5 words tie at 9 points, including cubes, curbs and scrub.
Rearranging the letters in obscures produces 56 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with bore, boss and core. For points, the strongest plays are cobs, cube, cubs, and curb — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling obscures turns up 43 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with bus, cue and our. For points, the strongest plays are cob and cub — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
There are 10 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in obscures. If a familiar word is all you need, start with be, or, so, and us. For points, the strongest plays are be and bo — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
2 nine-letter words can be made using all the letters in obscures plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in obscures and you get a different eight-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 7 of the 8 letters, not all of them.
obscures 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 eleven senses for obscures. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
obscures is one of two eight-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing obscures unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are bescours and obscures, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from obscures 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 obscures produce 185 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 eight-letter words, 6 seven-letter words, 26 six-letter words, 42 five-letter words, 56 four-letter words, 43 three-letter words and 10 two-letter words.