Hidden inside inlays sit inlays and layins, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 64 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
inlays and layins tie for the highest Scrabble score from inlays at 9 points. The top 10 of 64 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in inlays: one comes from rearranging its letters, and inlays itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are inlays and layins, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
There are 8 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in inlays. If a familiar word is all you need, start with nails. For points, the strongest plays are ayins, inlay, layin, and lysin — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in inlays produces 20 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lays, nail, and sail. For points, 8 words tie at 7 points, including lays, ayin and inly.
Unscrambling inlays turns up 22 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with any, lay, say, and sin. For points, 9 words tie at 6 points, including any, lay and say.
There are 12 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in inlays. If a familiar word is all you need, start with an, as and ay. For points, the strongest plays are ay and ya — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
7 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in inlays plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in inlays 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.
inlays 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 1-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 inlays. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
inlays is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing inlays unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are inlays and layins, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from inlays 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 inlays produce 64 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 8 five-letter words, 20 four-letter words, 22 three-letter words and 12 two-letter words.