Hidden inside variola sit ovarial and variola, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 62 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
ovarial and variola tie for the highest Scrabble score from variola at 10 points. The top 10 of 62 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in variola: one comes from rearranging its letters, and variola 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 ovarial and variola, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
There are 12 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in variola. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are alvar, arval, avail and 8 more, each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in variola produces 21 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lava, liar, and oral. For points, 9 words tie at 7 points, including lava, arvo and oval.
Unscrambling variola turns up 18 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with air and oil. For points, 6 words tie at 6 points, including ava, avo and lav.
2 eight-letter words can be made using all the letters in variola plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in variola 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.
variola 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 one sense for variola. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
variola is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing variola unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are ovarial and variola, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from variola 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 variola produce 62 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 12 five-letter words, 21 four-letter words, 18 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.