Hidden inside swell sit swell and wells, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 14 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
swell and wells tie for the highest Scrabble score from swell at 8 points. The top 10 of 14 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in swell: one comes from rearranging its letters, and swell itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. Here the everyday answers and the top-scoring plays are one and the same: swell and wells, worth 8 points apiece in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in swell and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
swell 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 eleven senses for swell. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
swell is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing swell unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are swell and wells, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from swell 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 swell produce 14 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 4 four-letter words, 4 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.