Hidden inside waist sit waist and waits, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 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.
Unscramble WSITA, SIATW or WTISA and you get the same 5 letters as WAIST: so the words from WAIST listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
waist and waits tie for the highest Scrabble score from waist at 8 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 waist: one comes from rearranging its letters, and waist itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. Here the everyday answers and the top-scoring plays are one and the same: waist and waits, worth 8 points apiece in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in waist 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.
waist 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.
Both totals match, because every tile in waist carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record two senses for waist. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
waist is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing waist unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are waist and waits, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from waist 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 waist produce 37 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 11 four-letter words, 15 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.