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The AltF Lexicon word of the day for Friday, 22 May 2026 is pickaxe — a noun meaning "a heavy iron tool with a wooden handle and a curved head that is pointed on both ends". It is said pic-kaxe, stressed on "pic".
a heavy iron tool with a wooden handle and a curved head that is pointed on both ends
“they used picks and sledges to break the rocks”
2 syllables, with the beat on "pic" — pic-kaxe.
This word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so the syllable split above was derived from its spelling and no phonetic transcription is printed. A guessed one that looked authoritative would be worse than none.
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 "artifact" 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 edge tool, and above 1 narrower term (mattock).
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.
Friday, 22 May 2026 is day 142 of its year, and slot 142 of the 366-word rotation holds pickaxe. 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. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.