Hidden inside startup sit startup and upstart, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 103 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
startup and upstart tie for the highest Scrabble score from startup at 9 points. The top 10 of 103 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in startup: one comes from rearranging its letters, and startup itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these seven-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are startup and upstart, each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
There are 23 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in startup. If a familiar word is all you need, start with parts, start and strap. For points, 15 words tie at 7 points, including parts, strap and traps.
Rearranging the letters in startup produces 37 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with arts, part and past. For points, 21 words tie at 6 points, including part, past and puts.
Unscrambling startup turns up 33 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with art, put and rap. For points, 17 words tie at 5 points, including put, rap and tap.
There are 8 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in startup. If a familiar word is all you need, start with as, at, up, and us. For points, the strongest plays are pa and up — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
3 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in startup plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in startup and you get a different seven-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 6 of the 7 letters, not all of them.
startup 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 2-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 startup. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
startup is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing startup unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are startup and upstart, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from startup 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 startup produce 103 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 23 five-letter words, 37 four-letter words, 33 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.