Somewhere behind every rare word you've ever found is a person. A grandmother at a kitchen window. A teacher with a favorite insult. A deckhand, a nurse, a novel read under the covers. Today OUTLIER finally has a place for them.
It started with one message
@gwin is a Founding Keeper, one of the first people to chip in to keep OUTLIER running. They wrote to tell me what they love about the game, and it wasn't the scoring or the leaderboards. It was that OUTLIER rewards people for their odd, specialist interests: the subjects you could bore your friends to tears about. No other word game pays you for knowing what a ship's carpenter calls a joint, or what your grandmother called a grey wet day.
Then they went further. The really interesting part, @gwin said, isn't the unusual word somebody found. It's how on earth they knew it. A place where players share that could help keep alive the words that are slipping away: dialect words, regional words, the private vocabulary of trades and towns and families.
When I wrote back, they sent the line that sealed it for me: a word like dreich, for one particular kind of miserable Scottish weather, carries far more than the plain English version ever could. It's history. It's identity. And it disappears when people stop saying it.
I read that and knew we had to build it.
What it looks like
Every word has its own story wall, right on its word page. The people who found the word tell how they knew it. Everyone else can like, reply and follow along.
Then there's the Word Stories Wall itself: every story from every word in one feed. Sort it by New or Top, narrow it to your Orbit, or search for any word, even one nobody's written about yet.
Your words are waiting
Here's the part I love most. Every word you've ever found on OUTLIER is sitting on My Word Stories, waiting for its story. It deals you a story prompt, one of your rarest untold finds at a time, and you can shuffle until one makes you smile.
- Find a wordPlay the daily board. Any word you find counts, not just the rare ones.
- Tell how you knew itOnce the day is over, open My Word Stories, or tap How did you know it? under any find on your results. Add where it's from if you like: a place, a trade, a family. Emoji welcome.
- Share itYour story goes straight onto the wall with its own share card, square for Instagram and wide for everywhere else.
Only the people who found a word can add to its wall, and their stories carry a Found it badge. That's what makes the wall worth reading: every story is told by someone who earned it.
Why it matters
OUTLIER rewards rarity because rare words are where the interesting people are. But a score is a number. It can't tell you that @enantiomeric knows PHOTOLYZED from breaking molecules apart with lasers in graduate school, or that @vocabularious knows INCUS because a sister-in-law named her white kitten after it. A story can.
And there's something bigger at stake. Regional and dialect words are disappearing. A word lives as long as somebody says it, and it goes quiet when the last of them stops. A wall full of players saying where they learned their words is a record of who still says them, and where. That's worth more to me than any leaderboard.
So there are no points here. No score, rarity or rank appears anywhere near a story. It's the one corner of OUTLIER that's purely about the people behind the words.
Tell me yours
Go and find a word you know a story about. Your gran's word, your town's word, the word from your first job. Tell it in a sentence. Then read a few others. I promise you'll learn something.
Signed in? The Add your story button takes you straight to your own words.
Questions about how it works are answered in the FAQ. And if you have an idea like @gwin's, tell us. This is how OUTLIER gets better, one player at a time.