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say it: RIK-uh-tee
UncommonadjectiveThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Tuesday, 24 March 2026 is rickety — an adjective meaning "inclined to shake as from weakness or defect". It is said ric-ke-ty, stressed on "ric".
inclined to shake as from weakness or defect
“a rickety table”
“a wobbly chair with shaky legs”
“the ladder felt a little wobbly”
“the bridge still stands though one of the arches is wonky”
rickety 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.
3 syllables, with the beat on "ric" — ric-ke-ty. The transcription /ˈɹɪkəti/ 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 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.
Tuesday, 24 March 2026 is day 83 of its year, and slot 83 of the 366-word rotation holds rickety. 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.