Hidden inside waken sit knawe and waken, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 12 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 32 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
knawe and waken tie for the highest Scrabble score from waken at 12 points. The top 10 of 32 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in waken: one comes from rearranging its letters, and waken itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are knawe and waken, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in waken produces 9 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with knew, wake, and weak. For points, 5 words tie at 11 points, including knew, wake and weak.
Swap a single tile in waken 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.
waken 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 two senses for waken. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
waken is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing waken unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are knawe and waken, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from waken 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 waken produce 32 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 9 four-letter words, 12 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.