zodiac needs no unscrambling at all — the six-letter word is already the strongest play its own letters allow, banking 18 points in Scrabble as it stands. In all, 30 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble CZODIA, DIACZO or DIAZCO and you get the same 6 letters as ZODIAC: so the words from ZODIAC listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
zodiac is the highest-scoring word from zodiac, worth 18 points in Scrabble. The top 10 of 30 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
Only one six-letter word uses the letters in zodiac — and it is zodiac itself. No unscrambling is needed: the word is already playable as written, worth 18 points in Scrabble.
There are 3 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in zodiac. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring word is azoic, worth 16 points in Scrabble.
1 seven-letter word can be made using all the letters in zodiac plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in zodiac 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.
zodiac 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 zodiac. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 18 points on a Scrabble board:
zodiac is the only six-letter word the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing zodiac unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring play from these letters is zodiac, worth 18 points in Scrabble, and no other word from zodiac 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 zodiac produce 30 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 1 six-letter word, 3 five-letter words, 7 four-letter words, 11 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.