Ah, another week, another fascinating linguistic journey with our favorite daily word challenge. I always enjoy reviewing the Wordle words from the past seven days, particularly to observe the intriguing obscurity spikes in their Google Trends data. It's truly a delight to imagine players, after grappling with a particularly tricky word scramble, heading straight to their search engines to unravel the meaning of the word that just bested them in the daily game.

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

This week, we're particularly interested in the 'obscurity spikes'—the words that prompted the largest percentage jump in Google searches when they appeared as the day's Wordle answer. This metric, the 'spike %', is especially sensitive to words that begin with a very low baseline of interest. When a word is rarely searched in its daily life, even a moderate increase in absolute searches can translate into an astronomical percentage spike. Our champion this week, CAROM, perfectly illustrates this phenomenon, topping both the raw chart swing with an H-L of 700 and the percentage spike with an astounding 70000% increase. With a baseline near zero, its peak search interest of roughly 700 truly catapulted its relative search volume. This suggests 'carom' is a term not frequently encountered in everyday discourse, making its appearance in the Wordle challenge a genuine jumble for many players.

Our runner-up, PRUDE, also showed a substantial spike of 2450% from a low baseline, indicating it too presented a notable challenge for solvers.

On a linguistic note, it's always fun to see how these five-letter words can rearrange into other valid terms, offering a little word puzzle within the word puzzle. For instance, DENSE cleverly scrambles into 'NEEDS', and INLET can form 'INTEL' or 'ELINT'. These little anagrammatic connections add another layer of playful complexity to the daily game.

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)

This week nudged the all-time Wordle obscurity leaderboard: CAROM muscled its way in, and the top five most obscure answers I've seen so far are now CAROM (+70000%), GUNKY (+27500%), BEFIT (+25800%), SHOAL (+11100%), SERIF (+10350%).

Word game sentence

The laden ship, having navigated the dense fog of the coastal inlet, finally arrived, its envoy sworn to deliver the crucial message without a hint of prudish hesitation, even as the waves seemed to carom against its hull.

This sentence attempts to create a somewhat dramatic scene, though the inclusion of 'prudish' might feel a touch forced next to the nautical imagery. It's a testament to the versatility of the English lexicon that these seemingly disparate words can be woven into a single narrative thread, a linguistic challenge not unlike the daily Wordle game itself.

For Math Nerds