smugly needs no unscrambling at all — the six-letter word is already the strongest play its own letters allow, banking 12 points in Scrabble as it stands. In all, 31 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble MYUSGL, GYMSLU or LYGUMS and you get the same 6 letters as SMUGLY: so the words from SMUGLY listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
smugly is the highest-scoring word from smugly, worth 12 points in Scrabble. The top 10 of 31 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
Only one six-letter word uses the letters in smugly — and it is smugly itself. No unscrambling is needed: the word is already playable as written, worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling smugly produces exactly one five-letter word: glums. It is not one of the common answers — a genuine unscrambler find — and it banks 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in smugly produces 13 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with gums, guys and gyms. For points, the strongest play is gyms — worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in smugly 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.
smugly 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 3-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record one sense for smugly. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
smugly is the only six-letter word the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing smugly unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring play from these letters is smugly, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and no other word from smugly 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 smugly produce 31 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 1 six-letter word, 1 five-letter word, 13 four-letter words, 12 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.