Wordle obscurity: Apr 19–Apr 25, 2026

I have spent my morning analyzing the linguistic fallout from last week’s Wordle sessions, and the results are quite illuminating. It is a fascinating hobby of mine to observe how players, after grappling with a particularly stubborn scramble of letters, flock to Google to verify a definition or confirm their suspicions. This week’s data offers a classic lesson in the difference between relative and absolute growth within the context of our favorite daily word play.

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

Our obscurity winner this week is CLUMP, which boasted a 200% spike in search interest. It is a textbook example of how our metric favors relative change. While the word WOMEN actually experienced the largest raw chart swing—jumping 68 points—its baseline interest is already quite high because it is a fundamental part of the English lexicon. Consequently, that large numerical increase only resulted in a 31% spike. CLUMP, however, began with a baseline of nearly zero. It appears that while most people know what a clump is, seeing it in the context of a jumble of letters prompted a significant number of players to double-check its status as a valid solution.

As a brief aside for those who enjoy a side of anagrams with their morning coffee, the word SNORE can be rearranged into SENOR, turning a simple five-letter answer into a tiny linguistic puzzle of its own. We also saw a healthy 100% runner-up spike for WEAVE, suggesting that interlacing those letters was a bit more of a challenge than some expected.

Whether you navigated the week with ease or found yourself stumped by a particular game, remember that every solved grid is a small victory for the mind. If you are curious about the raw data, you can explore the trends yourself below.

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

The top 5 most obscure words used in Wordle, since I started doing this March 1, 2026, are still CAROM (+70000%), ELFIN (+35900%), CUBIT (+33500%), GUNKY (+27500%), BEFIT (+25800%).

Word game sentence

The group of women had to weave through a dense clump of bushes to stand where they could hear the drunkard's rhythmic snore and the occasional bird's tweet.

This sentence integrates our seven words with surprising cohesion, though the auditory combination of a tweet and a snore is perhaps more whimsical than one might encounter in nature. It is always a delight to see how a week of Wordle can be distilled into a single narrative moment.

For Math Nerds