Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Outlier

I love finding daily games that let you play with words in new ways, and my latest favorite is Outlier. We’ve seen daily word searches before (maybe you use our daily Strands hints?), but this one is a bit different. Instead of finding specific words—or the most words—you’re asked to find the rarest words you can. 

When you play Outlier, you’re given a grid of letters. The grid isn’t the important part; you don’t have to worry about which letters touch each other. Think of them more like a pile of Scrabble tiles, and use as many as you like, in any order, to create a word. 

You’ll be scored on how unusual your picks are, compared to their frequency in the English language. If you go for the obvious words—RATS, STAR, TARS—you won’t score very highly. But if you can find rare words, you’ll gain more points. Each possible word has a rarity score, and you’re judged on how good your total score is compared to the 10 best (rarest) words that you could have potentially found.

But besides that scoring, there’s also the question of whether you’re finding words that other players have found. After your game finishes, you’ll find out about those. The first time I played, I found three words that nobody else had found that day (yet): SKIVE, WHOLES, and WAIN. I knew “wain” from reading old books; it was the medieval name for the Big Dipper constellation, referring to a farming wagon. My best word that day was GLOWERS, which only 38 people in the entire history of Outlier had found in any puzzle. In total, I scored 806, which is pretty good. 

To play the daily game, go to playoutlier.com and peruse the grid for words of four letters or more. The letters don’t have to touch; you’re just using the letters you want, not looking for connections. 

Type a word into the box at the bottom, and the letters you type will be highlighted on the board so you can keep track of which ones you’ve used. Hit enter when you’re done typing your word. You’ll get a score for the word’s rarity, and then you can start again with another word. 

After you play 10 words, you’re done, and your score will be tallied up along with some statistics—this is where I learned about the words I was the first to find that day. Outlier also keeps a few lists. For example, pioneers are people who found a word before anyone else in the history of the game, and there’s a leaderboard ranked by how many firsts each person has found. 

If you’d like to go head-to-head with others, there’s also Outlier Live. Instead of the daily board, you’ll get a board just for your game, and just 60 seconds to play a round against the other people in the room. 

Take your time. Some words may jump out at you right away, but the point isn’t to be the fastest or guess the most—it’s to skip the easy and obvious words, and try to find something special. 

Take a look at the board type, which will be named above the board, right under today’s date. Click that and you’ll get a sense of how hard or easy the board is to play. If it’s Deep Water, there aren’t a lot of valid words available, but the ones that are there tend to score pretty high. The opposite is the Open Field, a “generous” board with lots of words to find. Watch out for the Decoy boards, which “look generous and play mean.” On those, make an extra effort to skip the easy words and keep looking for rarer ones. 

To find rare words, sometimes I’ll scan the board to see what pops out, and then ask myself if I know any rarer words that use similar letters. For example, if you see WRITE, don't stop there—that's a common word, and so is WRITES. But subtract a letter, and you can have WRIT, which is uncommon, or WRITS, which is rare. If UNDERWRITE is also on the board, that's another rare one, and you can do even better with UNDERWRITES, which ranks as "epic."

There’s a guide to finding rare words on the Outlier website, and it points out that there are two types of rare words. One type is made up of words for rare things, where you don’t see that word often because its meaning isn’t often needed. (We don't UNDERWRITE things as often as we WRITE things.) The other is where an unusual word has the same meaning as a plainer word: we say "document" or "court order" more often than we say WRIT. So think about unusual synonyms for words you already know. 

Outlier’s guide also suggests rearranging the letters of a word you’ve found, and asking what else it might spell—similar to my tip above. The guide also points out that once you’ve played the game, you’ll start noticing rare words in everyday life, and you may want to keep a list to help yourself remember them. 

Outlier doesn’t require a subscription, but creating an account means you can get onto the leaderboards like Pioneers and see statistics for how well you’ve played over time. If you’d like to support the game financially, there’s a Patreon or the option to make a donation. But the game itself is free to play.