Hidden inside rifle sit filer, flier, lifer and 1 other, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 33 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble REIFL, LIRFE or RIEFL and you get the same 5 letters as RIFLE: so the words from RIFLE listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
filer, flier, lifer and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from rifle at 8 points. The top 10 of 33 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 five-letter words hiding in rifle: three come from rearranging its letters, and rifle 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 filer, flier, lifer, and rifle, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in rifle produces 11 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with file, fire, and life. For points, 7 words tie at 7 points, including file, fire and life.
22 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in rifle plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in rifle 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.
rifle 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 three senses for rifle. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
rifle is one of four five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing rifle unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are filer, flier, lifer, and rifle, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from rifle 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 rifle produce 33 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 five-letter words, 11 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.