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say it: HAM-string
UncommonverbnounThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Friday, 26 June 2026 is hamstring — a verb and noun meaning "make ineffective or powerless". It is said ham-string, stressed on "ham".
make ineffective or powerless
“The teachers were hamstrung by the overly rigid schedules”
hamstring 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 "ham" — ham-string. The transcription /ˈhæmˌstɹɪŋ/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries 3 senses, spread across 2 parts of speech (verb and noun) — 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 "emotion" verb 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 torment.
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, 26 June 2026 is day 177 of its year, and slot 177 of the 366-word rotation holds hamstring. 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.