A daily global word hunt where common is worthless and rare is everything. Find the words everyone else missed.
The rules
- 1
Build words from the grid
You're picking 10 words. Every day there's a 5×5 grid of 25 letters — spell any real word, 4 letters or longer. Use a letter no more often than it appears in the grid. Letters don't have to touch.
- 2
Chase the rare ones
You're not after the most words. You're after the rarest ones. Each find earns points based on how rare the word is — scored out of 1,000. Ten guesses a day. A guess that's too short is free — fix it and try again.
- 3
Lock in
Done, or out of guesses? Lock in. Your score is final for the day and you earn a rank based on your rarest find. A fresh grid drops every 16:00 UTC (12 PM Eastern).
Board Types
Every day's board has a terrain — some are wide open, some run deep, some are trickier than they look. The rules never change, just the texture. Learn the board types →
How a word scores
Every word has a permanent Rarity Score from 0 to 100, set before the puzzle drops, derived from real English-frequency data. Your score is the share of points based on its rarity, scaled to 0–1,000. Find everything → 1,000. Same grid, three different finds:
One rare word can outscore a long list of obvious ones. Rarity is set by real English frequency, not by what other players found, so your score is fixed the moment you lock in the word.
The rarity ladder
Every word lands in one of six tiers. The rarer the find, the longer the bar — and the higher the score.
Tips & strategy to score higher
Higher scores come from rarity, not volume. One obscure word can outscore a long list of obvious ones. Look past the first words you see: unusual letter pairings, less-common endings, plurals and verb forms, and the words most players skip are where the points hide. Spend your ten guesses chasing the rare ones, not the easy ones. Read the full Tips & Strategy guide →
Want to go deeper on the words themselves? See Rare Words: A Field Guide to the Ones Worth Knowing →
Play to win
Ready to play for the leaderboard? Our full strategy guide for competitive players covers how rarity scoring really works, how to spend your ten guesses, where the rare words hide, how to win ties, how to beat the Encore tax, and how to treat every board like a portfolio of bets. Read How to Win at OUTLIER →
Your finishes feed four boards: today’s live ranking, the monthly Season race, the Hall of Fame, and Most Consistent — and every month resets, so everyone gets a fresh shot at #1. How the leaderboards work →
Make it a competition
OUTLIER is better with a rival. Your result page gives you a copyable score and a downloadable card; the Share page has one-tap buttons for the game itself. Here’s how people make it stick:
Daily Outlier vs. Outlier Live
Same game of finding the rarest words — two ways to play. The Daily is the solo puzzle everything above describes. Outlier Live turns it into a real-time party game.
New here? Read What Is OUTLIER? The Daily Game of Finding What Everyone Else Missed →
Play today’s Outlier →