Hidden inside rifer sit firer, frier, and rifer, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 19 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
firer, frier, and rifer tie for the highest Scrabble score from rifer at 8 points. The top 10 of 19 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 five-letter words hiding in rifer: two come from rearranging its letters, and rifer itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are firer, frier, and rifer, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling rifer turns up 8 three-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these three-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are fer, fie, fir and 2 more, each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in rifer and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
rifer 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.
Both totals match, because every tile in rifer carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
rifer is one of three five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing rifer unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are firer, frier, and rifer, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from rifer 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 rifer produce 19 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 five-letter words, 3 four-letter words, 8 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.