cans and scan tie for the highest Scrabble score from scan at 6 points. The top 8 of 8 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 four-letter words hiding in scan: one comes from rearranging its letters, and scan itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with cans. For points, the strongest plays are cans and scan — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in scan 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.
scan 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 nine senses for scan. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
scan is one of two four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing scan unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are cans and scan, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from scan 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 scan produce 8 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 four-letter words, 3 three-letter words and 3 two-letter words.