public needs no unscrambling at all — the six-letter word is already the strongest play its own letters allow, banking 12 points in Scrabble as it stands. 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 PLBUCI, CLBPIU or CBLPIU and you get the same 6 letters as PUBLIC: so the words from PUBLIC listed below are the words from those scrambles too.
public is the highest-scoring word from public, worth 12 points in Scrabble. The top 10 of 19 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
Only one six-letter word uses the letters in public — and it is public itself. No unscrambling is needed: the word is already playable as written, worth 12 points in Scrabble.
There are 2 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in public. No common everyday answer stands out among these five-letter results, so let the score decide: the highest-scoring word is pubic, worth 11 points in Scrabble.
3 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in public plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in public 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.
public 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 5-point gap between the two totals comes from the tile values themselves: Scrabble and Words With Friends price the same letters differently.
Dictionaries record four senses for public. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 12 points on a Scrabble board:
public is the only six-letter word the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing public unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring play from these letters is public, worth 12 points in Scrabble, and no other word from public 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 public produce 19 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 1 six-letter word, 2 five-letter words, 4 four-letter words, 8 three-letter words and 4 two-letter words.