Hidden inside ruse sit rues, ruse, suer and 2 others, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 15 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
rues, ruse, suer and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from ruse at 4 points. The top 10 of 15 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 four-letter words hiding in ruse: four come from rearranging its letters, and ruse itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with sure. For points, 5 words tie at 4 points, including sure, rues and ruse.
42 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in ruse plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in ruse and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
ruse 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 ruse. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
ruse is one of five four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing ruse unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are rues, ruse, suer, sure, and user, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from ruse 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 ruse produce 15 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 four-letter words, 6 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.