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say it: HEL-pluhs
CommonadjectiveThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Wednesday, 18 February 2026 is helpless — an adjective meaning "lacking in or deprived of strength or power". It is said hel-pless, stressed on "hel".
lacking in or deprived of strength or power
“lying ill and helpless”
“helpless with laughter”
helpless carries 3 recorded senses in total. Open the full entry to read them all, grouped by part of speech and each with its own synonyms, antonyms and broader and narrower terms.
2 syllables, with the beat on "hel" — hel-pless. The transcription /ˈhɛlpləs/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries 3 senses — 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 single adjective file — it sorts nouns and verbs by subject but keeps adjectives together, which is where the relations below come from rather than from any editorial judgement of ours.
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.
Wednesday, 18 February 2026 is day 49 of its year, and slot 49 of the 366-word rotation holds helpless. 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.