Hidden inside windup sit upwind and windup, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 12 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 23 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
upwind and windup tie for the highest Scrabble score from windup at 12 points. The top 10 of 23 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 six-letter words hiding in windup: one comes from rearranging its letters, and windup itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are upwind and windup, each worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling windup produces exactly one four-letter word: wind. It is an everyday word and an easy play, worth 8 points in Scrabble.
2 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in windup plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in windup and you get a different six-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 5 of the 6 letters, not all of them.
windup 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 3-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 windup. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
windup is one of two six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing windup unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are upwind and windup, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from windup 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 windup produce 23 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 six-letter words, 1 four-letter word, 14 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.