The rare daily word game sweeping the globe. Find what's hidden in plain sight.
VIRULENT
Definition of VIRULENT
adjective
Of animals, plants, or substances: extremely venomous or poisonous.
Wiktionary · CC BY-SA
Where it comes from
From Middle English virulent (“leaking or seeping pus, purulent; (of putrefaction) extremely severe (sense uncertain)”) [and other forms], borrowed from Latin vīrulentus (“poisonous”), from vīrus (“poison; venom; slime, slimy liquid; stinking smell; nasty taste”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wisós (“poison; slime; fluidity”)) + -ulentus (suffix meaning ‘abounding in, full of’, forming adjectives). Sense 4 (“of a pathogen: replicating within its host cell, then immediately causing it to undergo lysis”) is derived from French virulent, which was first used in this sense by the French biologist François Jacob (1920–2013) and his co-authors in a 1953 article.
Etymology via Wiktionary (CC BY-SA).
Word DNA
Line of descent
4 recorded generations before English.
Deepest traced root
5th
of 58 source languages in OUTLIER
7.2%
of traced words share this origin (2,103)
branch · 15.4% of traced words
How it is built
OUTLIER scores every word on how unusual it is, and that number is not published. Working it out at the board is the game.
VIRULENT in OUTLIER
Players have found it on 79 boards so far. 584 players have found it across Outlier's history.
It first turned up on Day 8, 29 May 2026. The most recent board was Day 142, 9 October 2026. Nobody has seen it on a board for 5 days.
First found by a player on Day 8, 29 May 2026.
Built from these letters
VIRULENT starts with V and ends with T. Sorted, its letters read EILNRTUV - the shape to hunt for when the grid is scrambled. No letter is used twice, which makes it an isogram.
Words that start VIRULE
Its neighbours in the OUTLIER dictionary - shortest first.
Could you have found VIRULENT?
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