Hidden inside pestholes sit heelposts, pestholes, and teleshops, nine-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 14 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 297 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
heelposts, pestholes, and teleshops tie for the highest Scrabble score from pestholes at 14 points. The top 10 of 297 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 nine-letter words hiding in pestholes: two come from rearranging its letters, and pestholes itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these nine-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are heelposts, pestholes, and teleshops, each worth 14 points in Scrabble.
There are 6 eight-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in pestholes. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hopeless. For points, 5 words tie at 13 points, including hopeless, heelpost and heptoses.
Rearranging the letters in pestholes produces 8 valid seven-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with topless. For points, the strongest plays are heptose and poshest — each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling pestholes turns up 35 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hotels, sheets, sleeps, and steels. For points, the strongest plays are shleps, splosh, thesps, and tophes — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 79 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in pestholes. If a familiar word is all you need, start with heels, helps and holes. For points, 11 words tie at 10 points, including helps, hopes and sheep.
Rearranging the letters in pestholes produces 98 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with else, heel and help. For points, 13 words tie at 9 points, including help, hope and hops.
Unscrambling pestholes turns up 51 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hop, hot and let. For points, 6 words tie at 8 points, including hop, hep and peh.
There are 17 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in pestholes. If a familiar word is all you need, start with eh, he and ho. For points, 5 words tie at 5 points, including eh, he and ho.
1 ten-letter word can be made using all the letters in pestholes plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in pestholes and you get a different nine-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 8 of the 9 letters, not all of them.
pestholes 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 one sense for pestholes. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 14 points on a Scrabble board:
pestholes is one of three nine-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing pestholes unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are heelposts, pestholes, and teleshops, worth 14 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from pestholes 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 pestholes produce 297 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 nine-letter words, 6 eight-letter words, 8 seven-letter words, 35 six-letter words, 79 five-letter words, 98 four-letter words, 51 three-letter words and 17 two-letter words.