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say it: PATH-uhn
The AltF Lexicon word of the day for Monday, 9 March 2026 is pathan — a noun meaning "a member of the mountain people living in the eastern regions of Afghanistan". It is said pat-han, stressed on "pat".
a member of the mountain people living in the eastern regions of Afghanistan
“Pathans are the predominant ethnic group in Afghanistan”
pathan carries 2 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 "pat" — pat-han. The transcription /ˈpæθən/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries 2 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 "person" 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 Afghan.
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.
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.
Monday, 9 March 2026 is day 68 of its year, and slot 68 of the 366-word rotation holds pathan. 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.