Hidden inside shear sit hares, hears, rheas and 2 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 50 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
hares, hears, rheas and 5 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from shear at 8 points. The top 10 of 50 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 5 five-letter words hiding in shear: four come from rearranging its letters, and shear itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hears and share. For points, the strongest plays are hares, hears, rheas, share, and shear — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
The full list follows, sorted A to Z; every score reflects tile constraints and skips board bonuses.
Rearranging the letters in shear produces 15 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ears, eras, hear, hers, and rash. For points, the strongest plays are haes, hare, hear, hers, rash, resh, rhea, and shea — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
Below, the list runs in alphabetical order, with each score based on the playable tile set — premium squares not included.
Unscrambling shear turns up 19 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with are, ash, ear, era, has, her, and sea. For points, the strongest plays are ahs, ash, hae, has, her, hes, rah, sha, and she — each worth 6 points in Scrabble.
The words below are listed alphabetically. Scores count playable tiles only and leave out premium-square bonuses.
There are 11 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in shear. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ah, as, eh, ha, he, and sh. For points, the strongest plays are ah, eh, ha, he, and sh — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
The full list follows, sorted A to Z; every score reflects tile constraints and skips board bonuses.
49 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in shear plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in shear 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.
shear 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 six senses for shear. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
shear is one of five five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing shear unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are hares, hears, rheas, share, and shear, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from shear 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 shear produce 50 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 5 five-letter words, 15 four-letter words, 19 three-letter words and 11 two-letter words.