Hidden inside trail sit trail and trial, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 37 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
trail and trial tie for the highest Scrabble score from trail at 5 points. The top 10 of 37 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in trail: one comes from rearranging its letters, and trail itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. Here the everyday answers and the top-scoring plays are one and the same: trail and trial, worth 5 points apiece in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in trail produces 13 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with liar and tail. For points, 13 words tie at 4 points, including liar, tail and airt.
Swap a single tile in trail 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.
trail 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 eight senses for trail. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
trail is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing trail unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are trail and trial, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from trail 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 trail produce 37 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 13 four-letter words, 13 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.