Hidden inside salve sit laves, levas, salve and 5 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 43 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
laves, levas, salve and 2 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from salve at 8 points. The top 10 of 43 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 8 five-letter words hiding in salve: seven come from rearranging its letters, and salve itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with slave and veals. For points, 8 words tie at 8 points, including slave, veals and laves.
Rearranging the letters in salve produces 15 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with sale, save and seal. For points, 10 words tie at 7 points, including save, vase and veal.
30 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in salve plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in salve 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.
salve 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 2-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record four senses for salve. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
salve is one of eight five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing salve unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are laves, levas, salve, selva, slave, vales, valse, and veals, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from salve 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 salve produce 43 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 8 five-letter words, 15 four-letter words, 14 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.