Hidden inside strives sit stivers, strives, and verists, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 95 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble ESRITVS, SRIVETS or VISSTER and you get the same 7 letters as STRIVES: so the words from STRIVES listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
stivers, strives, and verists tie for the highest Scrabble score from strives at 10 points. The top 10 of 95 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 seven-letter words hiding in strives: two come from rearranging its letters, and strives 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 stivers, strives, and verists, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling strives turns up 9 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with resist and sister. For points, 6 words tie at 9 points, including rivets, sivers and stiver.
There are 21 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in strives. If a familiar word is all you need, start with rests, rises and sites. For points, 9 words tie at 8 points, including vests, rives and rivet.
Rearranging the letters in strives produces 30 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with rest, rise and sets. For points, 9 words tie at 7 points, including vest, vets and revs.
Unscrambling strives turns up 23 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with its, set and sir. For points, 5 words tie at 6 points, including vet, rev and sev.
9 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in strives plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in strives 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.
strives 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 strives. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
strives is one of three seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing strives unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are stivers, strives, and verists, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from strives 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 strives produce 95 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 seven-letter words, 9 six-letter words, 21 five-letter words, 30 four-letter words, 23 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.