Hidden inside shams sit shams and smash, five-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 10 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 21 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
shams and smash tie for the highest Scrabble score from shams at 10 points. The top 10 of 21 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 2 five-letter words hiding in shams: one comes from rearranging its letters, and shams itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with smash. For points, the strongest plays are shams and smash — each worth 10 points in Scrabble.
Swap a single tile in shams 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.
shams 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.
Both totals match, because every tile in shams carries the same value on a Scrabble board and on a Words With Friends board.
Dictionaries record five senses for shams. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 10 points on a Scrabble board:
shams is one of two five-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing shams unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are shams and smash, worth 10 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from shams 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 shams produce 21 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 2 five-letter words, 5 four-letter words, 7 three-letter words and 7 two-letter words.