Hidden inside alto sit alto, lota, and tola, four-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 4 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 14 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
alto, lota, and tola tie for the highest Scrabble score from alto at 4 points. The top 10 of 14 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 3 four-letter words hiding in alto: two come from rearranging its letters, and alto itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. No common everyday answer stands out among these four-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring words are alto, lota, and tola, each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
26 five-letter words can be made using all the letters in alto plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in alto and you get a different four-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 3 of the 4 letters, not all of them.
alto 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 eight senses for alto. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 4 points on a Scrabble board:
alto is one of three four-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing alto unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are alto, lota, and tola, worth 4 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from alto 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 alto produce 14 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 3 four-letter words, 5 three-letter words and 6 two-letter words.