Wordle obscurity: Jul 12–Jul 18, 2026

As a retired professor who still loves a good linguistic puzzle, I spent some time this morning reviewing last week's Wordle words and their Google Trends obscurity spikes. I must confess, I thoroughly enjoy thinking about how Wordle players, after struggling with a particularly difficult challenge, go search for the word in Google to see what it means. Analyzing these search patterns reveals a fascinating look at our collective vocabulary gaps; when a daily wordplay session leaves us scratching our heads, we collectively turn to search engines to verify if that bizarre sequence of letters is indeed a legitimate term. This week, we saw some truly remarkable jumps in search volume, highlighting how a simple five-letter word game can temporarily scramble the internet's search habits.

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 undisputed champion of obscurity this week is STEAK, boasting an astronomical search spike of 83300%. Now, why would a common culinary term cause such a massive jump? This brings us to an interesting statistical quirk: our spike percentage metric heavily rewards relative change from a near-zero baseline. While STEAK had an absolute chart swing of 833 points, its baseline was practically non-existent in this specific tracking window, magnifying the percentage. In contrast, a word like LEGAL saw a substantial raw chart swing of 411 points, but because it maintains a high, steady background interest of daily searches, its spike was a modest 128%. It seems common nouns like steak rarely get looked up for definitions until they become the focus of a daily challenge, whereas legal terms have constant, real-world utility.

As a delightful side note for those who appreciate a good anagram puzzle, several of this week's words can be rearranged into other familiar terms. For instance, our winner, STEAK, belongs to a highly active anagram family that includes skate, stake, takes, and teaks. It is always a pleasure to see how a simple set of five letters can be jumbled into so many distinct words.

The runner-up in this week's analysis was the dismissive interjection PSHAW, which registered a massive 50000% spike. Unlike our winner, this is a word that many players likely had to search simply to verify its spelling or meaning after completing their daily game.

This week's results have significantly shaken up our all-time obscurity leaderboard. STEAK and PSHAW have both claimed spots in the top five. The current standings for the most dramatic search spikes we have recorded are: OVATE (+110000%), PIZZA (+103300%), STEAK (+83300%), CAROM (+70000%), and PSHAW (+50000%).

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

Word game sentence

Inside the legal boundaries of the dusty county, a stout traveler sitting in a diner booth loudly pshawed at the menu's overpriced steaks, his boots clacking on the floor as he stared out the window at the distant, flat-topped butte.

While synthesizing these seven disparate terms into a single narrative thread is always a playful challenge, this sentence actually flows quite naturally, painting a vivid picture of a disgruntled diner in the American West. The transition from the auditory clacking of boots to the visual majesty of the butte provides a nice sensory contrast. It is a testament to how even the most scrambled assortment of words can be woven into a cohesive story, reminding us why we find such joy in playing these daily word games.

For Math Nerds