Hidden inside vacates sit caveats and vacates, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 12 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 85 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
caveats and vacates tie for the highest Scrabble score from vacates at 12 points. The top 10 of 85 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in vacates: one comes from rearranging its letters, and vacates 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 caveats and vacates, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
There are 10 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in vacates. If a familiar word is all you need, start with caves. For points, the strongest plays are cavas and caves — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in vacates produces 34 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with acts, case and cast. For points, the strongest plays are cava, cave, and vacs — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling vacates turns up 28 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with act, ate and cat. For points, the strongest play is vac — worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in vacates 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.
vacates 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 three senses for vacates. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
vacates is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing vacates unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are caveats and vacates, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from vacates 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 vacates produce 85 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 3 six-letter words, 10 five-letter words, 34 four-letter words, 28 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.