Hidden inside handles sit handles and handsel, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 11 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 159 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
handles and handsel tie for the highest Scrabble score from handles at 11 points. The top 10 of 159 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in handles: one comes from rearranging its letters, and handles itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with handles. For points, the strongest plays are handles and handsel — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Below, the list runs in alphabetical order, with each score based on the playable tile set — premium squares not included.
Unscrambling handles turns up 9 six-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with handle. For points, the strongest plays are endash, handle, lashed, and shaled — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
The words below are listed alphabetically. Scores count playable tiles only and leave out premium-square bonuses.
There are 35 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in handles. If a familiar word is all you need, start with deals, hands, heads, heals, lands, lanes, and leads. For points, the strongest plays are ashed, dahls, deash, dhals, hades, haled, hands, heads, sadhe, shade, and shend — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
The full list follows, sorted A to Z; every score reflects tile constraints and skips board bonuses.
Rearranging the letters in handles produces 54 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with deal, ends, hand, head, heal, held, and hens. For points, the strongest plays are ahed, dahl, dahs, dash, dhal, edhs, hade, haed, hand, head, held, shad, and shed — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Below, the list runs in alphabetical order, with each score based on the playable tile set — premium squares not included.
Unscrambling handles turns up 40 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ads, and, ash, end, had, has, and hen. For points, the strongest plays are dah, edh, and had — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
The words below are listed alphabetically. Scores count playable tiles only and leave out premium-square bonuses.
There are 19 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in handles. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ad, ah, an, as, eh, ha, and he. For points, the strongest plays are ah, eh, ha, he, and sh — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
The full list follows, sorted A to Z; every score reflects tile constraints and skips board bonuses.
Swap a single tile in handles 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.
handles 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 seven senses for handles. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 11 points on a Scrabble board:
handles is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing handles unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are handles and handsel, worth 11 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from handles 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 handles produce 159 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 9 six-letter words, 35 five-letter words, 54 four-letter words, 40 three-letter words and 19 two-letter words.