Hidden inside shorts sit horsts and shorts, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 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.
horsts and shorts tie for the highest Scrabble score from shorts at 9 points. The top 10 of 43 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in shorts: one comes from rearranging its letters, and shorts itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with shorts. For points, the strongest plays are horsts and shorts — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
There are 6 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in shorts. If a familiar word is all you need, start with hosts, short, shots, and sorts. For points, 5 words tie at 8 points, including hosts, short and shots.
Rearranging the letters in shorts produces 15 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with host, shot, sort, and toss. For points, 9 words tie at 7 points, including host, shot and hoss.
There are 7 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in shorts. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ho, oh and or. For points, the strongest plays are ho, oh, and sh — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
2 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in shorts plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in shorts and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
shorts 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 two senses for shorts. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
shorts is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing shorts unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are horsts and shorts, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from shorts 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 shorts produce 43 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 6 five-letter words, 15 four-letter words, 13 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.