The rare daily word game sweeping the globe. Find what's hidden in plain sight.
SHORTENING
Definition of SHORTENING
noun
Fat that is solid at room temperature, especially hydrogenated vegetable oil (known as vegetable shortening), used to make shortcrust pastry and in deep fat frying.
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Word DNA
SHORTENING inherits its ancestry from its root, SHORTEN.
Line of descent
3 recorded generations before English.
Deepest traced root
7th
of 59 source languages in OUTLIER
3.5%
of traced words share this origin (937)
branch · 22.8% of traced words
How it is built
Same root, SHORTEN · 4 relatives in the game
OUTLIER scores every word on how unusual it is, and that number is not published. Working it out at the board is the game.
SHORTENING in OUTLIER
Players have found it on 1 board so far.
It first turned up on Day 132, 29 September 2026. Nobody has seen it on a board for 2 days.
First ever to find it
on Day 132, 29 September 2026 - before anyone else in Outlier's history. See the Pioneers
Built from these letters
SHORTENING starts with S and ends with G. Sorted, its letters read EGHINNORST - the shape to hunt for when the grid is scrambled. N appears more than once.
Words that start SHORTE
Its neighbours in the OUTLIER dictionary - shortest first.
Could you have found SHORTENING?
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 132 - and most players walked straight past it.
Play today's OUTLIER