Hidden inside rails sit arils, lairs, laris and 4 others, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 5 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.
arils, lairs, laris and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from rails at 5 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 rails: six come from rearranging its letters, and rails itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with liars. For points, 7 words tie at 5 points, including liars, arils and lairs.
Rearranging the letters in rails produces 16 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with airs, liar, and sail. For points, 16 words tie at 4 points, including airs, liar and sail.
26 six-letter words can be made using all the letters in rails plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in rails 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.
rails 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 one sense for rails. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 5 points on a Scrabble board:
rails is one of seven five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing rails unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are arils, lairs, laris, liars, liras, rails, and rials, worth 5 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from rails 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 rails produce 45 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 five-letter words, 16 four-letter words, 14 three-letter words and 8 two-letter words.