Hidden inside paella sit paella and paleal, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 29 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
paella and paleal tie for the highest Scrabble score from paella at 8 points. The top 10 of 29 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in paella: one comes from rearranging its letters, and paella 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 paella and paleal, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 2 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in paella. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are lapel and palea, each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
There are 7 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in paella. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are pa and pe, each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in paella 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.
paella 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 one sense for paella. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
paella is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing paella unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are paella and paleal, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from paella 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 paella produce 29 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 2 five-letter words, 7 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.