Hidden inside tangles sit gelants and tangles, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 196 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
gelants and tangles tie for the highest Scrabble score from tangles at 8 points. The top 10 of 196 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in tangles: one comes from rearranging its letters, and tangles 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 gelants and tangles, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling tangles turns up 8 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with agents, angels, and angles. For points, 7 words tie at 7 points, including agents, angels and angles.
There are 40 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in tangles. If a familiar word is all you need, start with agent, angel and angle. For points, 19 words tie at 6 points, including agent, angel and angle.
Rearranging the letters in tangles produces 79 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ages, ants and east. For points, 34 words tie at 5 points, including ages, gals and gate.
Unscrambling tangles turns up 52 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with age, ant and ate. For points, 19 words tie at 4 points, including age, gal and gas.
There are 15 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in tangles. If a familiar word is all you need, start with an, as, and at. For points, the strongest play is ag — worth 3 points in Scrabble.
11 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in tangles plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in tangles 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.
tangles 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 six senses for tangles. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
tangles is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing tangles unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are gelants and tangles, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from tangles 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 tangles produce 196 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 8 six-letter words, 40 five-letter words, 79 four-letter words, 52 three-letter words and 15 two-letter words.