Hidden inside pirates sit parties, pastier, piaster and 4 others, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 293 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
parties, pastier, piaster and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from pirates at 9 points. The top 10 of 293 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 7 seven-letter words hiding in pirates: six come from rearranging its letters, and pirates itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with parties and pirates. For points, 7 words tie at 9 points, including parties, pirates and pastier.
Unscrambling pirates turns up 29 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with pirate, praise, priest, and stripe. For points, 24 words tie at 8 points, including pirate, praise and priest.
There are 84 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in pirates. If a familiar word is all you need, start with pairs, parts and raise. For points, 59 words tie at 7 points, including pairs, parts and spare.
Rearranging the letters in pirates produces 92 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with airs, apes and arts. For points, 46 words tie at 6 points, including apes, pair and part.
Unscrambling pirates turns up 63 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with air, ape and are. For points, 24 words tie at 5 points, including ape, pea and per.
There are 18 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in pirates. If a familiar word is all you need, start with as, at, is, and it. For points, the strongest plays are pa, pe, and pi — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
36 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in pirates plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in pirates 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.
pirates 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 five senses for pirates. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
pirates is one of seven seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing pirates unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are parties, pastier, piaster, piastre, pirates, praties, and traipse, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from pirates 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 pirates produce 293 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 seven-letter words, 29 six-letter words, 84 five-letter words, 92 four-letter words, 63 three-letter words and 18 two-letter words.