Wordle obscurity: May 17–May 23, 2026

Another week of Wordle in the books, and I couldn't resist reviewing last week's Wordle words and their Google Trends obscurity spikes, because I do enjoy watching how players, after wrestling with a particularly prickly challenge, head to Google to see what on earth the word means.

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: the words that made the sharpest jump in searches when they landed as the daily answer in the puzzle. This week’s standout was CHUCK, with search interest rising by about 31700% from a baseline that was essentially flat. In raw chart terms, though, CHUCK was not the largest mover: LOATH had the biggest H−L swing, climbing from roughly 0 to about 290, while CHUCK went from about 0 to around 317. That distinction matters because spike% rewards relative change from a low floor, so a word can look spectacular even when its absolute chart range is only one piece of the story.

By contrast, a word like LOATH may have a slightly smaller percentage spike than CHUCK but still posts a very large raw jump, which suggests a sudden burst of curiosity around a less familiar answer. In a case like that, I suspect the pattern reflects the usual Wordle effect: a word that sits quietly in the background until the game turns it into a little language puzzle, and then everybody scrambles for a definition.

One small side note from the week’s wordplay: LOATH produced a tidy anagram cluster with ALTHO and LOTAH, while AGREE also turns up a neat little jumble family with EAGER, EAGRE, and RAGEE. Wordle has a way of making even familiar letters feel like fresh anagram bait.

Whether you solved every grid or had to look up a word or two, I hope the week felt pleasantly challenging. Word games should be a puzzle, not a punishment.

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

The runner-up in this little word-search race was LOATH, up about 29000% from its own baseline (from roughly 0 up to 290). Not quite as dramatic as CHUCK on the percentage scale, but still a fine little spike for a daily word game.

The top 5 most obscure words used in Wordle, since I started doing this March 1, 2026, are still CAROM (+70000%), DOWDY (+36700%), ELFIN (+35900%), CUBIT (+33500%), CHUCK (+32000%).

Word game sentence

The bylaw committee was loath to let the dusty wreck agree with the vocal chuck of the crowd, but the little word game still turned the whole scramble into a tidy jumble of meanings.

That sentence is a touch contrived, of course, but it does manage to thread every word through a single grammatical line without sounding completely assembled from spare parts. That is part of the charm of Wordle: even a difficult challenge can leave us with a neat little lesson in vocabulary.

For Math Nerds