Hidden inside terns sit nerts, rents, stern and 1 other, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 34 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
nerts, rents, stern and 6 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from terns at 5 points. The top 10 of 34 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 4 five-letter words hiding in terns: three come from rearranging its letters, and terns itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with rents. For points, the strongest plays are nerts, rents, stern, and terns — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in terns produces 11 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with nest, nets and rent. For points, 11 words tie at 4 points, including nest, nets and rent.
There are 7 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in terns. No common everyday answer stands out among these two-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are en, er, es and 4 more, each worth 2 points in Scrabble.
36 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in terns plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in terns 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.
terns 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 one sense for terns. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
terns is one of four five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing terns unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are nerts, rents, stern, and terns, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from terns 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 terns produce 34 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 4 five-letter words, 11 four-letter words, 12 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.