Hidden inside sap sit asp, pas, sap and 1 other, three-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 6 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
asp, pas, sap and 2 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from sap at 5 points. The top 6 of 6 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 three-letter words hiding in sap: three come from rearranging its letters, and sap itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these three-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are asp, pas, sap, and spa, each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
59 four-letter words can be made using all the letters in sap plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in sap and you get a different three-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 2 of the 3 letters, not all of them.
sap 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 five senses for sap. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
sap is one of four three-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing sap unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are asp, pas, sap, and spa, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from sap 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 sap produce 6 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 three-letter words and 2 two-letter words.