Hidden inside silent sit elints, enlist, inlets and 4 others, six-letter plays tied at the top of this rack with 6 points in Scrabble apiece. In all, 98 valid words come out of this rack, grouped by length below and checked for Words With Friends as well as Scrabble.
elints, enlist, inlets and 3 others tie for the highest Scrabble score from silent at 6 points. The top 10 of 98 words are shown here, with the full list organized by length below.
There are 7 six-letter words hiding in silent: six come from rearranging its letters, and silent itself is already a playable word with no unscrambling required. If a familiar word is all you need, start with listen and silent. For points, 7 words tie at 6 points, including listen, silent and elints.
There are 19 five-letter words that can be made by unscrambling the letters in silent. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lines. For points, 19 words tie at 5 points, including lines, elint and inlet.
Rearranging the letters in silent produces 33 valid four-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with lent, lets and lies. For points, 33 words tie at 4 points, including lent, lets and lies.
Unscrambling silent turns up 27 three-letter words. If a familiar word is all you need, start with its, let and lie. For points, 27 words tie at 3 points, including its, let and lie.
41 seven-letter words can be made using all the letters in silent plus one additional letter.
Swap a single tile in silent 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.
silent 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 six senses for silent. Scrabble and Words With Friends score tiles and not meanings, so every sense below is worth the same 6 points on a Scrabble board:
silent is one of seven six-letter words the same letters produce. No arrangement of the same tiles scores higher in Scrabble, so playing silent unchanged also takes the maximum points these letters offer.
The highest-scoring plays from these letters are elints, enlist, inlets, intels, listen, silent, and tinsel, worth 6 points in Scrabble, and nothing else built from silent 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 silent produce 98 valid words in the Scrabble and Words With Friends dictionaries. The word count by length is: 7 six-letter words, 19 five-letter words, 33 four-letter words, 27 three-letter words and 12 two-letter words.