The rare daily word game sweeping the globe. Find what's hidden in plain sight.
SHEAR
Definition of SHEAR
verb
To remove the fleece from (a sheep, llama, etc.) by clipping.
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Where it comes from
From Middle English sheren, scheren, from Old English sċieran (“to shear; to shave”), from Proto-West Germanic *skeran, from Proto-Germanic *skeraną, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”). Cognate with West Frisian skarre, Low German, Dutch, and German scheren, Danish skære, Norwegian Bokmål skjære, Norwegian Nynorsk skjera, Swedish skära, Faroese and Icelandic skera, (borrowed from Germanic) Finnish keritä; and (from Indo-European) with Kamkata-viri ċarë́- (“to chop”), Ancient Greek κείρω (keírō, “to cut off”), Latin caro (“flesh”), Albanian shqerr (“to tear, cut”), harr (“to cut, to mow”), Lithuanian ski̇̀rti (“separate”), Welsh ysgar (“separate”). See also sharp.
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.
SHEAR in OUTLIER
Players have found it on 19 boards so far. 18 players have found it across Outlier's history.
It first turned up on Day 8, 29 May 2026. The most recent board was Day 104, 1 September 2026. Nobody has seen it on a board for 6 days.
First found by a player on Day 8, 29 May 2026.
Built from these letters
SHEAR starts with S and ends with R. Sorted, its letters read AEHRS - the shape to hunt for when the grid is scrambled. No letter is used twice, which makes it an isogram.
Same letters, different word
4 other words use exactly these letters. Worth knowing at the board: an anagram fits a grid the same way.
Words that start SHEAR
Its neighbours in the OUTLIER dictionary - shortest first.
Also seen on Day 8
Could you have found SHEAR?
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 8 - and most players walked straight past it.
Play today's OUTLIER