Hidden inside lares sit arles, earls, lares and 5 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 52 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
arles, earls, lares and 2 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from lares at 5 points. The top 10 of 52 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 8 five-letter words hiding in lares: seven come from rearranging its letters, and lares itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with laser. For points, 8 words tie at 5 points, including laser, arles and earls.
Rearranging the letters in lares produces 17 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with ears, eras and real. For points, 17 words tie at 4 points, including ears, eras and real.
Unscrambling lares turns up 18 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with are, ear, era, and sea. For points, 18 words tie at 3 points, including are, ear and era.
67 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in lares plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in lares 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.
lares 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.
lares is one of eight five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing lares unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are arles, earls, lares, laser, lears, rales, reals, and seral, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from lares 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 lares produce 52 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 8 five-letter words, 17 four-letter words, 18 three-letter words and 9 two-letter words.