Arithmetical complexity of a sequence is the number of words of length n that can be extracted from it according to arithmetic progressions. We study uniformly recurrent words of low arithmetical complexity and describe the family of such words having lowest complexity.

The arithmetical complexity of infinite words, defined by Avgustinovich, Fon-Der-Flaass and the author in 2000, is the number of words of length n which occur in the arithmetical subsequences of the infinite word. This is one of the modifications of the classical function of subword complexity, which is equal to the number of factors of the infinite word of length n. In this paper, we show that the orders of growth of the arithmetical complexity can behave as many sub-polynomial functions. More precisely, for each sequence u of subword complexity ƒu(n) and for each prime p ≥ 3 we build a Toeplitz word on the same alphabet whose arithmetical complexity is $a(n)=\Theta(n f_u(\lceil \log_p n \rceil))$.