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say it: di-TEKT
CommonverbThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Sunday, 1 February 2026 is detect — a verb meaning "discover or determine the existence, presence, or fact of". It is said de-tect, stressed on "tect".
discover or determine the existence, presence, or fact of
“She detected high levels of lead in her drinking water”
“We found traces of lead in the paint”
2 syllables, with the beat on "tect" — de-tect. The transcription /dɪˈtɛkt/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries a single recorded sense, which is the ordinary case: the corpus averages 1.4 senses an entry across 147,478 of them.
Its first sense is filed in WordNet's "perception" verb 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 spy, and above 5 narrower terms (find out, sense and instantiate among them).
Commonness band 4 of 5 — Common. Everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. 4,497 of the 147,478 entries share that band, measured against a corpus of everyday English rather than assigned by an editor.
Every sentence above is derived from the entry’s stored record. Nothing here is a story about where the word came from, because the corpus does not carry etymology and a plausible invented one would be the only unverifiable claim on the page.
Sunday, 1 February 2026 is day 32 of its year, and slot 32 of the 366-word rotation holds detect. The mapping is arithmetic on the date and nothing else, so this page said the same thing a year ago and will say it a year from now, and every other day in the archive resolves the same way. How the rotation works, in full.
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.