Hidden inside polythene sit polythene and telephony, nine-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 17 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 193 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
polythene and telephony tie for the highest Scrabble score from polythene at 17 points. The top 10 of 193 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 nine-letter words hiding in polythene: one comes from rearranging its letters, and polythene 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 polythene and telephony, each worth 17 points in Scrabble.
There are 3 eight-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in polythene. No common everyday answer stands out among these eight-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring word is neophyte, worth 16 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in polythene produces 3 valid seven-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are neotype, polyene, and potheen, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling polythene turns up 19 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with phoney and plenty. For points, 7 words tie at 14 points, including phoney, phenyl and phylon.
There are 27 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in polythene. If a familiar word is all you need, start with honey, hotel and phone. For points, the strongest plays are phony and phyle — each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in polythene produces 63 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with heel, help and hole. For points, the strongest plays are hype and hypo — each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling polythene turns up 56 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with eye, hen and hey. For points, the strongest play is hyp — worth 11 points in Scrabble.
There are 20 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in polythene. If a familiar word is all you need, start with eh, he and ho. For points, 7 words tie at 5 points, including eh, he and ho.
2 ten-letter words can be made using all the letters in polythene plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in polythene 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.
polythene 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 polythene. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 17 points on a Scrabble board:
polythene is one of two nine-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing polythene unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are polythene and telephony, worth 17 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from polythene 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 polythene produce 193 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 nine-letter words, 3 eight-letter words, 3 seven-letter words, 19 six-letter words, 27 five-letter words, 63 four-letter words, 56 three-letter words and 20 two-letter words.