Scrabble word finder
Put in your seven tiles and this ranks every legal word by what it actually scores, highest first. If you are building off a letter already on the board, set that letter as the start or the end and the list narrows to plays that will physically fit.
- 50 points
- The bonus for playing all seven tiles in one turn. Bigger than most Q plays
- 61 squares
- Premium squares on the board, from 24 double letters up to 8 triple words
- 4 S tiles
- All the S you will ever get. Each one is a hook onto something already played
The score on the tile is only half the story
A word finder can tell you that JUKEBOX is worth twenty-seven points as bare letters. What it cannot see is that you have a triple word square two spaces to the left and a place to put the X on a double letter. Those two facts are usually worth more than the word choice.
So use the ranking as a shortlist rather than an answer. Look at the top ten, then ask which of them reaches a premium square, and which of them puts a high-value letter somewhere your opponent can use next turn.
A twelve point word onto a triple beats a twenty-four point word onto plain squares, and it does not hand over the lane.
Multipliers stack
Cover two double word squares with a single play and the word scores four times. Cover two triples and it scores nine. Letter multipliers apply before word multipliers, which is the ordering that makes a high tile on a double letter inside a triple word play so valuable.
Every tile, its value and how many exist
Counting tiles is a real skill in a close endgame. Once around forty tiles are on the board you can work out with reasonable confidence whether the last S is still in the bag or sitting in your opponent's rack.
The same information as a table
| Value | Letters | Tiles in the bag |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Blank | 2 |
| 1 | E | 12 |
| 1 | A, I | 9 each |
| 1 | O | 8 |
| 1 | N, R, T | 6 each |
| 1 | L, S, U | 4 each |
| 2 | D | 4 |
| 2 | G | 3 |
| 3 | B, C, M, P | 2 each |
| 4 | F, H, V, W, Y | 2 each |
| 5 | K | 1 |
| 8 | J, X | 1 each |
| 10 | Q, Z | 1 each |
Getting the fifty point bonus more often
Playing all seven tiles is not luck, or at least not entirely. It is mostly a question of what you choose to keep, and most players give away their chances long before the rack ever comes up.
Keep the letters that combine
The letters in RETINAS are the most productive seven in the game. Any rack close to that shape has an enormous number of ways to become a seven-letter word, because those letters appear in an enormous number of them. If you have a choice between dumping a T and dumping a V, the V goes.
The reverse also holds. Two Is and a U in the same rack is a problem you should solve immediately, even at the cost of a low-scoring turn, because it will not solve itself.
Aim for three vowels and four consonants
Not a hard rule, just the ratio that tends to leave the most options open. Five consonants and two vowels reads like a strong rack and usually is not, because you cannot glue them together. Watch what your play leaves behind, not just what it scores.
Learn the common seven and eight letter endings
A large share of bonus words are an ordinary six-letter word plus S, or a five-letter word plus one of a small handful of endings. -IER, -IEST, -ING, -ERS, -EST and -IES between them account for a great many of them. Once you start seeing your rack as a stem plus an ending, the words appear much faster.
Do not save a rack forever
Holding six good letters while you wait for the seventh costs you a turn every time you do it. Two turns of waiting is usually already more than the fifty points is worth. Take the reasonable play, keep the good letters, and let the bonus arrive when it arrives.
Try a difficult rack
These are the shapes that actually come up and cause trouble. Each one opens the finder with the tiles already in.
Also useful: the 107 two-letter words and the Q words that need no U.
Scrabble rules people get wrong
How many tiles are there of each letter?
One hundred tiles in an English set, and the distribution is not decorative. There are twelve Es and only one each of J, K, Q, X and Z. Nine As, nine Is, eight Os. That is why vowel-heavy racks feel so common: nearly half the bag is vowels.
The distribution table further down this page is worth a look if you have never counted it. Knowing there are exactly four S tiles changes how you feel about spending one.
What is the fifty point bonus actually called?
A bonus, or a bonus word, which is what you will hear at any British club. Americans call the same thing a bingo, and you will see that term on a lot of websites because most of them are written for a North American audience.
Either way it is fifty points on top of whatever the word itself scores, and it is the single largest swing available in a normal game.
Which dictionary do British tournaments use?
Collins Scrabble Words, usually shortened to CSW and still called SOWPODS by players who have been at it a while. It runs to something close to 280,000 words and is used across the UK and almost everywhere outside North America, which plays a separate and smaller list called TWL at roughly 192,000.
Collins is far more permissive. Plenty of words pass without comment at a club in Leeds that would be challenged off the board in Chicago.
Our word list is a public-domain one and sits closer to the North American side, so it finds fewer words than a Collins list would. The about page explains exactly what that means and where the gaps are.
What happens if someone challenges my word?
Under the Collins rules used at British clubs, a challenge is free: if the word is invalid it comes off and the player loses their turn, and if it is valid play simply continues with no penalty to the challenger. That is why challenging is so common in UK play, and why bluffing rarely works.
North American rules differ here. There a failed challenge usually costs the challenger their next turn, which makes people far more reluctant to question a word. Worth agreeing which variant you are playing before you start.
Casual games at home usually settle it by looking the word up, and the tiles go back as they were.
Can I play a word that is already on the board?
Yes, the same word can appear more than once, as long as each placement is legal in its own right. What you cannot do is add letters to an existing word without the result also being valid, and you cannot leave a stray two-letter combination sitting perpendicular to your play unless that combination is itself a word. This is the rule that catches people out most often.
Is a blank worth anything once it is on the board?
Nothing at all, and it stays worth nothing even on a double or triple letter square, since there is no value to multiply. It does still count for word multipliers, though. A blank sitting on a triple word square is fine: the letter scores zero, the whole word still triples.