Hidden inside sachem sit maches, sachem, samech and 1 other, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 13 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 81 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
maches, sachem, samech and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from sachem at 13 points. The top 10 of 81 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 six-letter words hiding in sachem: three come from rearranging its letters, and sachem itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are maches, sachem, samech, and schema, each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
There are 14 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in sachem. If a familiar word is all you need, start with chase and shame. For points, 6 words tie at 12 points, including chams, chasm and chems.
Rearranging the letters in sachem produces 29 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ahem, came and case. For points, the strongest plays are cham, chem, mach, and mech — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling sachem turns up 21 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ash, ham and has. For points, the strongest plays are ham, hem, and meh — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 13 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in sachem. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ah, am and as. For points, the strongest play is hm — worth 7 points in Scrabble.
11 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in sachem plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in sachem and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
sachem 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 two senses for sachem. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 13 points on a Scrabble board:
sachem is one of four six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing sachem unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are maches, sachem, samech, and schema, worth 13 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from sachem 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 sachem produce 81 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 six-letter words, 14 five-letter words, 29 four-letter words, 21 three-letter words and 13 two-letter words.