Wordle obscurity: Apr 26–May 2, 2026

I have spent the morning reviewing last week's Wordle words and the fascinating spikes they cause in Google Trends. It is a quiet joy to observe how players, after facing a particularly stubborn challenge, immediately scramble to their search bars to uncover a word's precise meaning. It seems that when a word is a bit of a jumble for the mind, the first instinct is to verify the data and ensure the solution truly fits the grid.

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, EERIE, provided a masterclass in relative versus absolute growth. While EERIE’s 1833% spike is statistically dominant, PLUME actually experienced a larger raw swing on the 0–100 scale, moving 61 points compared to EERIE’s 55. We prioritize the percentage because it highlights words that transition from total obscurity to sudden relevance. EERIE’s baseline of 3 suggests it was nearly invisible before the daily play, whereas PLUME’s baseline of 7 indicates a slightly more robust, if still niche, level of background interest—perhaps due to its use in environmental or meteorological contexts.

As a side note for those who enjoy a good letter scramble, I noticed that GLOSS shares its exact composition with SLOGS, making for a tidy little anagram pair. Whether you found the week's vocabulary to be a simple pleasure or a difficult game, I hope you enjoyed the process of discovery. Word games are a wonderful way to keep the mind sharp and the vocabulary fresh.

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 rural doctor, a total quack, tried to gloss over his eerie crock of nonsense as a plume of smoke rose from his pipe, yet he failed to bring any real relief to his patients.

This sentence manages to integrate the week’s vocabulary with surprising cohesion, though pairing "crock" and "quack" does lean heavily into the more skeptical side of our lexicon. It is a testament to how even a random assortment of words from a daily challenge can form a narrative. Wordle remains a delightful daily ritual for the linguistically curious.

For Math Nerds