Hidden inside spares sit aspers, parses, passer and 5 others, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 90 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
aspers, parses, passer and 2 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from spares at 8 points. The top 10 of 90 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 8 six-letter words hiding in spares: seven come from rearranging its letters, and spares itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with spares. For points, 8 words tie at 8 points, including spares, aspers and parses.
There are 22 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in spares. If a familiar word is all you need, start with press and spare. For points, 19 words tie at 7 points, including press, spare and apers.
Rearranging the letters in spares produces 29 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with apes, ears and eras. For points, 20 words tie at 6 points, including apes, pass and peas.
Unscrambling spares turns up 23 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ape, are and ass. For points, 11 words tie at 5 points, including ape, pea and per.
38 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in spares plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in spares 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.
spares 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 thirteen senses for spares. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
spares is one of eight six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing spares unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are aspers, parses, passer, prases, repass, spares, sparse, and spears, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from spares 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 spares produce 90 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 8 six-letter words, 22 five-letter words, 29 four-letter words, 23 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.