The rare daily word game sweeping the globe. Find what's hidden in plain sight.
QUARK
Definition of QUARK
noun
In the Standard Model, one of a number of elementary subatomic particles having fractional electric charge that forms matter. They are theorized not to exist in isolation, but only in combinations in hadrons such as neutrons and protons or in quark–gluon plasmas.
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Where it comes from
Sense 1 (“subatomic particle”) was coined by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) in 1963, apparently an arbitrary word. Subsequently, in a letter dated 27 June 1978 to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, Gell-Mann associated the word with the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and indicated that he pronounced the word /kwɔɹk/, reasoning that the sentence referred to a call in a pub for “three quarts”. However, the context in the book indicates that quark is probably a variant of quawk (“harsh call of a bird”) and was intended by Joyce to be pronounced /kwɑːk/, the modern pronunciation.
Etymology via Wiktionary (CC BY-SA).
OUTLIER scores every word on how unusual it is, and that number is not published. Working it out at the board is the game.
QUARK in OUTLIER
Players have found it on 10 boards so far. 271 players have found it across Outlier's history.
It first turned up on Day 23, 12 June 2026. The most recent board was Day 101, 29 August 2026. Nobody has seen it on a board for 8 days.
First ever to find it
on Day 23, 12 June 2026 - before anyone else in Outlier's history. See the Pioneers
Built from these letters
QUARK starts with Q and ends with K. Sorted, its letters read AKQRU - the shape to hunt for when the grid is scrambled. No letter is used twice, which makes it an isogram. It uses Q - among the least common letters in written English.
Also seen on Day 23
Could you have found QUARK?
OUTLIER is a daily word game. One grid, the same grid for everybody, and the words nobody else spots are the ones that pay. This word was on Day 23 - and most players walked straight past it.
Play today's OUTLIER