Hidden inside sear sit ares, arse, ears and 4 others, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 23 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
ares, arse, ears and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from sear at 4 points. The top 10 of 23 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 7 four-letter words hiding in sear: six come from rearranging its letters, and sear itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ears and eras. For points, 7 words tie at 4 points, including ears, eras and ares.
107 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in sear plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in sear 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.
sear 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.
Both totals match, because every tile in sear carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record five senses for sear. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
sear is one of seven four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing sear unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ares, arse, ears, eras, rase, sear, and sera, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from sear 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 sear produce 23 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 four-letter words, 10 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.