Hidden inside ladders sit ladders, raddles, and saddler, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 125 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble LDREADS, SALDDER or DRESLAD and you get the same 7 letters as LADDERS: so the words from LADDERS listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
ladders, raddles, and saddler tie for the highest Scrabble score from ladders at 9 points. The top 10 of 125 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 seven-letter words hiding in ladders: two come from rearranging its letters, and ladders itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ladders. For points, the strongest plays are ladders, raddles, and saddler — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling ladders turns up 11 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ladder and sadder. For points, 9 words tie at 8 points, including ladder, sadder and adders.
There are 29 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in ladders. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dared, dares and deals. For points, 9 words tie at 7 points, including dared, adder and addle.
Rearranging the letters in ladders produces 38 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with adds, dads and dare. For points, the strongest plays are adds, dads, dead, and redd — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling ladders turns up 31 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with add, ads and are. For points, the strongest plays are add and dad — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
There are 13 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in ladders. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ad and as. For points, the strongest plays are ad, da, de, and ed — each worth 3 points in Scrabble.
10 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in ladders plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in ladders and you get a different seven-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 6 of the 7 letters, not all of them.
ladders 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 four senses for ladders. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
ladders is one of three seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing ladders unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ladders, raddles, and saddler, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from ladders 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 ladders produce 125 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 seven-letter words, 11 six-letter words, 29 five-letter words, 38 four-letter words, 31 three-letter words and 13 two-letter words.