Words with Friends Cheat & Word Finder

Player’s guide to Words with Friends

What changes when you move from Scrabble to Words with Friends — tile values, the bag, the smaller bonus and the plays that score most here. Each part stands on its own: jump to the one you need.

How this Words with Friends cheat works

• Type the tiles on your rack; every word that can be built from them is listed.
• Scores are Words with Friends scores, not Scrabble scores — the tile values are different, and so are the answers about which word is best.
• Only the Words with Friends word list is checked, because that is the only list the game will accept. There is no dictionary switch on this page for that reason.
• Blanks are supported: write _ or ? for each one. Letters a blank covers score zero and are marked in the results.
• Every word links to its page, where you can see the same word's Scrabble score, its hooks and its anagrams.

The tiles are not Scrabble tiles

This is the single most expensive assumption a Scrabble player brings to Words with Friends. 12 of the 26 letters are worth a different number of points in the two games, and some of them move a long way. A rack you would call strong in Scrabble can be an ordinary rack here, and the reverse happens just as often.

B 3 → 4 C 3 → 4 G 2 → 3 H 4 → 3 J 8 → 10 L 1 → 2 M 3 → 4 N 1 → 2 P 3 → 4 U 1 → 2 V 4 → 5 Y 4 → 3

Scrabble value first, Words with Friends value after the arrow. The consonants that gained value are the ones worth holding; the ones that lost value are the ones to play off early rather than save.

The bag is different too

Words with Friends deals from 104 tiles where Scrabble deals from 100, and the mix is not the same:

D ×4 → ×5 E ×12 → ×13 H ×2 → ×4 I ×9 → ×8 N ×6 → ×5 S ×4 → ×5 T ×6 → ×7

More of a letter in the bag means you will see it more often, and it means your opponent will too — which matters when you are deciding whether to block a lane or take the points now.

What the bag says about your rack

The Words with Friends bag holds 104 tiles. 69 of them are worth a single point, 42 are the vowels A, E, I, O and U, and only 4 tiles score eight or more — the J, Q, X, Z. Two blanks make up the rest.

That shape is why the board matters more than the draw. Most of what you hold at any moment is cheap, so the difference between a twelve-point turn and a forty-point turn is almost always the square you reach, not the letters you were dealt. Players who wait for a good rack wait a long time; players who watch the lanes score every turn.

Swapping here is cheaper than you think

Because the bonus for emptying your rack is smaller in this game, the maths of holding tiles changes with it. Sitting on an awkward rack for two turns hoping to reach a bingo is a bad trade when the reward is 35 rather than 50 — you give up two turns of ordinary scoring for a bonus that is a third smaller.

The practical version: play something almost every turn, and swap early rather than late when the rack is genuinely stuck. A rack with no vowels does not repair itself, and each turn you keep it, your opponent is scoring against a board that keeps opening up.

Playing alongside, not through

The highest-scoring turns in this game are usually not long words. They are short words laid parallel to something already on the board, so that every point of contact forms a second word and every one of those scores. Two tiles placed well can count three or four separate words at once.

This is exactly what the two-letter list at the top of the page is for. Learn a dozen two-letter words with their Words with Friends values, and racks that used to be dead turn into steady fifteen-point turns. Each word links to its own page, which shows the letters it hooks onto at the front and the back — that is the part that turns a small word into a parallel play.

Common questions

Why is the bonus for using all seven tiles smaller than in Scrabble? Words with Friends pays 35 points for emptying your rack; Scrabble pays 50. It changes the maths of holding tiles: chasing a bingo through two quiet turns is a worse trade here than it is in Scrabble.

Why do you not let me pick a dictionary here? Because the game will not. Showing you a Collins word that Words with Friends rejects would be worse than showing you nothing — you would play it, lose the turn, and have no idea why.

Is the word list the same as Scrabble's? No. It overlaps heavily and then diverges, in both directions. The Words with Friends list page carries the count we hold and when we last checked it.

Can I use this on the board, not just the rack? Yes — the browser extension reads the board you are playing and returns placements with scores, rather than a list of words you still have to find a spot for. It is linked from the extension page.

Is this cheating? Against a stranger who is doing the same thing, it is even. Against a friend who is not, it is not much of a game. Most people use it to learn what they missed after the turn, and that is the use we build for.

The rest of the site

• Scrabble word finder — same search under Scrabble tiles and your choice of word list.
• Word checker — is this word valid, and in which lists.
• Letter values side by side — the full table for both games, not only the letters that differ.
• Bingo stems — which six tiles are worth keeping while you wait for a seventh.