Another week of Wordle in the books, sweetheart, and I couldn't resist a peek at which words turned our little word game into a full-on word search across the internet.

About this chart. Each line is one Wordle answer’s search interest in the United States over the past seven days (Google Trends “Interest over time”). Values are on Google’s 0–100 scale, so you can compare how often people searched each word relative to the others this week.

How the Spike % is calculated. For each word we take the quietest day in that window (the lowest point on its line) as its usual level for the week, and the busiest day (the highest point) as the peak. The spike is the percentage increase from that low to that high: (peak − low) ÷ max(low, 1) × 100. If the week’s low is zero, we divide by 1 instead of 0 so the spike still measures how much interest rose from the floor to the peak. A larger spike means searches jumped more sharply when that word was the daily answer.

This week’s words

Obscurity winner

Using search interest in the US over the last seven days, I looked for the biggest “obscurity spikes”—words that saw the largest percentage jump in searches when they appeared as the answer in the daily word puzzle. This week's standout was ELFIN, with search interest spiking by about 35900% from its usual baseline: it usually sat near the bottom of the search charts, and then it jumped up to about 359 when it hit the grid. Given how tough this word is, that spike is a real mountain on the word-game charts.

Whether you aced every grid or learned a new word or two, I hope you had fun. Word games ought to feel like a treat, not a test. If you'd like to explore the trends yourself, you can see the full comparison below and turn it into your own little word-search challenge.

View these words on Google Trends (US, last 7 days)

The runner-up in this little word-search race was CUBIT, up about 33500% from its own baseline (from roughly 0 up to 335). Not quite as dramatic, but still a fine little spike for a daily word game.

This week nudged the all-time Wordle obscurity leaderboard: ELFIN muscled its way in, and the top five most obscure answers I've seen so far are now CAROM (+70000%), ELFIN (+35900%), CUBIT (+33500%), GUNKY (+27500%), BEFIT (+25800%).

For Math Nerds