It was serialized in Media Factory's seinen manga magazine Monthly Comic Alive between March 2007 and November 2011, and was compiled into nine tankōbon volumes.

[1][2] The series, which is set in a co-ed high school, is about Sumika Murasame, a 15-year-old girl who is secretly in love with her female best friend, Ushio Kazama.

Sumika discovers one of her classmates, a boy named Masaki Akemiya who likes her, started cross-dressing to catch her attention, but inadvertently was hired as a model.

Sumika becomes involved with her classmate Azusa Aoi, a quiet girl and aspiring writer who plans to attend a dōjinshi convention fueled by her love of yuri author Orino Masaka, which is the pen name of Ushio's older brother Norio.

After the sports day competition and cultural festival, a short German high school girl named Charlotte Münchhausen (nicknamed Lotte), comes to stay at Sumika's home and dojo to train in karate.

After Sumika and her friends enter their second year of high school, two first-year girls named Mayu Semimaru and Koino Matsubara join the female karate club.

[3] Ikeda later authored the yuri manga series The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This, which was serialized on publisher Gentosha's Comic Boost website between January 2020 and February 2022 and localized in North America by Seven Seas Entertainment.

[6][7] The Whispered Words manga was serialized in Japan in Media Factory's seinen magazine Monthly Comic Alive between its March 2007 and November 2011 issues.

[26] Tim Jones of THEM Anime Reviews said he feared that the series would turn into "another Maria Holic" and said that the first few episodes were frustrating to him, but the perverted thoughts of Sumika were "kept in her head, not expressed out loud".

Megan Gudeman of CBR said that the anime makes Sumika's crush on her friend, Ushio, "comedic", and said that there is enough "yuri representation throughout the cast to be considered a 2000s staple".

[30] Casalena also says that the story is "incredibly relatable" with those girls who are closeted likely finding "parallels between her life" and the events in the series.