Hidden inside windups sit upwinds and windups, seven-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 13 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 60 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble PUWINDS or SWIDUNP and you get the same 7 letters as WINDUPS: so the words from WINDUPS listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
upwinds and windups tie for the highest Scrabble score from windups at 13 points. The top 10 of 60 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 seven-letter words hiding in windups: one comes from rearranging its letters, and windups 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 upwinds and windups, each worth 13 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in windups produces 17 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dips, pins and spin. For points, the strongest plays are pwns and wisp — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling windups turns up 28 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with dip, ids and pin. For points, the strongest play is pwn — worth 8 points in Scrabble.
There are 9 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in windups. If a familiar word is all you need, start with id, in and is. For points, the strongest plays are pi and up — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in windups 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.
windups 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 windups. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 13 points on a Scrabble board:
windups is one of two seven-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing windups unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are upwinds and windups, worth 13 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from windups 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 windups produce 60 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 seven-letter words, 2 six-letter words, 2 five-letter words, 17 four-letter words, 28 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.