yearning needs no unscrambling at all — the eight-letter word is already the strongest play its own letters allow, banking 12 points in Scrabble as it stands. In all, 143 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
yearning is the highest-scoring word from yearning, worth 12 points in Scrabble. The top 10 of 143 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
Only one eight-letter word uses the letters in yearning — and it is yearning itself. No unscrambling is needed: the word is already playable as written, worth 12 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in yearning produces 7 valid seven-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with earning. For points, the strongest plays are yarning and yeaning — each worth 11 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling yearning turns up 13 six-letter words. No common everyday answer stands out among these six-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are anergy, grainy, granny, and raying, each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
There are 20 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in yearning. If a familiar word is all you need, start with anger, angry, gayer, inner, and range. For points, the strongest plays are angry, eying, gayer, ginny, gynie, rangy, and yager — each worth 9 points in Scrabble.
Rearranging the letters in yearning produces 42 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with earn, gain, gray, grey, near, nine, and rage. For points, the strongest plays are gray, grey, gyre, gyri, yage, yagi, and yang — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Unscrambling yearning turns up 45 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with age, air, any, are, aye, ear, and era. For points, the strongest plays are gay, gey, and yag — each worth 7 points in Scrabble.
There are 15 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in yearning. If a familiar word is all you need, start with an, ay, and in. For points, the strongest plays are ay, ya, and ye — each worth 5 points in Scrabble.
1 nine-letter word can be made using all the letters in yearning plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in yearning and you get a different eight-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 7 of the 8 letters, not all of them.
yearning 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 yearning. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
yearning is the only eight-letter word the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing yearning unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring play from these letters is yearning, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and no other word from yearning 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 yearning produce 143 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 1 eight-letter word, 7 seven-letter words, 13 six-letter words, 20 five-letter words, 42 four-letter words, 45 three-letter words and 15 two-letter words.