Hidden inside topic sit optic, picot, and topic, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 9 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 23 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
optic, picot, and topic tie for the highest Scrabble score from topic at 9 points. The top 10 of 23 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 five-letter words hiding in topic: two come from rearranging its letters, and topic itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with topic. For points, the strongest plays are optic, picot, and topic — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in topic 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.
topic 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 two senses for topic. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 9 points on a Scrabble board:
topic is one of three five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing topic unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are optic, picot, and topic, worth 9 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from topic 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 topic produce 23 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 five-letter words, 3 four-letter words, 10 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.