Hidden inside tans sit ants, stan, and tans, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 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.
ants, stan, and tans tie for the highest Scrabble score from tans at 4 points. The top 10 of 14 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 four-letter words hiding in tans: two come from rearranging its letters, and tans itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ants and tans. For points, the strongest plays are ants, stan, and tans — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
37 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in tans plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in tans and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
tans 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 six senses for tans. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
tans is one of three four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing tans unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ants, stan, and tans, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from tans 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 tans produce 14 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 four-letter words, 6 three-letter words and 5 two-letter words.