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say it: MUR-kyur-ee
FamiliarnounThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Monday, 18 May 2026 is mercury — a noun meaning "a heavy silvery toxic univalent and bivalent metallic element; the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures". It is said mer-cu-ry, stressed on "mer".
a heavy silvery toxic univalent and bivalent metallic element; the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures
mercury carries 4 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 "mer" — mer-cu-ry. The transcription /ˈmɝkjɚi/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries 4 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 "substance" 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 metallic element.
Commonness band 3 of 5 — Familiar. Widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. 10,501 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, 18 May 2026 is day 138 of its year, and slot 138 of the 366-word rotation holds mercury. 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.