perplex needs no unscrambling at all — the seven-letter word is already the strongest play its own letters allow, banking 18 points in Scrabble as it stands. In all, 32 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
perplex is the highest-scoring word from perplex, worth 18 points in Scrabble. The top 10 of 32 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
Only one seven-letter word uses the letters in perplex — and it is perplex itself. No unscrambling is needed: the word is already playable as written, worth 18 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in perplex produces 13 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with peel. For points, the strongest plays are plex and prex — each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in perplex 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.
perplex 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 two senses for perplex. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 18 points on a Scrabble board:
perplex is the only seven-letter word the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing perplex unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring play from these letters is perplex, worth 18 points in Scrabble, and no other word from perplex 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 perplex produce 32 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 1 seven-letter word, 3 five-letter words, 13 four-letter words, 10 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.