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say it: NER-oh-ing
UncommonnounadjectiveThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Sunday, 20 September 2026 is narrowing — a noun and adjective meaning "an instance of becoming narrow". It is said nar-ro-wing, stressed on "nar".
an instance of becoming narrow
WordNet records no synonym for this sense. That is normal for a precise word: the more exactly a sense is drawn, the fewer other words land on it.
This is the first of 5 recorded senses. The full entry for narrowing lists all of them, grouped by part of speech, each with its own synonyms, antonyms and broader and narrower terms.
3 syllables, with the beat on "nar" — nar-ro-wing. The transcription /ˈnɛɹoʊɪŋ/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries 5 senses, spread across 2 parts of speech (noun and adjective) — against a corpus average of 1.4 an entry. The meaning you already know is usually not the only one.
Its first sense is filed in WordNet's "attribute" noun file, which is where the relations below come from rather than from any editorial judgement of ours.
In the meaning hierarchy that sense sits directly under shape, and above 3 narrower terms (coarctation, taper and constriction).
Commonness band 2 of 5 — Uncommon. Turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. 31,297 of the 147,478 entries share that band, measured against a corpus of everyday English rather than assigned by an editor.
Everything in this note is read off the entry’s own record — its syllable split, its sense count, the WordNet file its first sense sits in, and its measured frequency band. There is no etymology here because the corpus carries none, and an invented derivation is the one claim a reader could not check.
The rotation is a fixed list of 366 words, one for every day of the longest possible year. A date is turned into its position in that year — Sunday, 20 September 2026 is day 263 — and the position picks the word. That is the whole rule. Nothing is random, nothing is stored, and no editor queues anything the night before.
Because the rule is arithmetic on the date, it runs backwards as happily as forwards. Every day since Thursday, 1 January 2026 has a permanent page at its own dated address, and they were all derivable before anyone asked for them. A word of the day published at one evergreen URL, overwritten each morning, has no history to link to at all.
Leap years are the reason the list is 366 long rather than 365. In a leap year 29 February takes a slot of its own and every date after it moves one place along; in a common year the last slot is never reached. Either way a given date always resolves to the same word, which is the property the archive needs.
Dates in the future return a 404 rather than tomorrow’s word. The answer is knowable — it is the same arithmetic — but serving it would open an endless set of dated pages running to the year 9999, none of which anyone would read.
Definitions, examples and semantic relations come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.
This page lists the most recent 120 days. Older days are still served — every date back to 1 Jan 2026 has a page, which is 263 of them so far — and each dated page carries links to the day before and the day after, so the whole run is walkable.
Every one of the 147,478 entries has its syllables split and its stressed syllable marked — not only the word of the day.
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