Hidden inside merge sit emerg and merge, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 8 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 19 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble GREEM, EEMGR or EERMG and you get the same 5 letters as MERGE: so the words from MERGE listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
emerg and merge tie for the highest Scrabble score from merge at 8 points. The top 10 of 19 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in merge: one comes from rearranging its letters, and merge itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with merge. For points, the strongest plays are emerg and merge — each worth 8 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in merge and you get a different five-letter rack with its own word list. None of these appear in the results above — they share 4 of the 5 letters, not all of them.
merge 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 three senses for merge. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 8 points on a Scrabble board:
merge is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing merge unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are emerg and merge, worth 8 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from merge 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 merge produce 19 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 4 four-letter words, 9 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.