Hidden inside names sit amens, manes, manse and 4 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 7 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 45 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
Unscramble ESAMN, SEMAN or SMEAN and you get the same 5 letters as NAMES: so the words from NAMES listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
amens, manes, manse and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from names at 7 points. The top 10 of 45 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 7 five-letter words hiding in names: six come from rearranging its letters, and names itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with means and names. For points, 7 words tie at 7 points, including means, names and amens.
Rearranging the letters in names produces 13 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with amen, mean and name. For points, 10 words tie at 6 points, including amen, mean and name.
There are 11 two-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in names. If a familiar word is all you need, start with am, an, as, and me. For points, the strongest plays are am, em, ma, and me — each worth 4 points in Scrabble.
32 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in names plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in names 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.
names 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 names. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 7 points on a Scrabble board:
names is one of seven five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing names unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are amens, manes, manse, means, mensa, names, and nemas, worth 7 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from names 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 names produce 45 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 five-letter words, 13 four-letter words, 14 three-letter words and 11 two-letter words.