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say it: BLEM-ish
UncommonverbnounThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Monday, 13 July 2026 is blemish — a verb and noun meaning "mar or spoil the appearance of". It is said blem-ish, stressed on "blem".
mar or spoil the appearance of
“scars defaced her cheeks”
“The vandals disfigured the statue”
blemish 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.
2 syllables, with the beat on "blem" — blem-ish. The transcription /ˈblɛmɪʃ/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
It carries 4 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 "contact" 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 mar, and above 2 narrower terms (maul and scar).
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, 13 July 2026 is day 194 of its year, and slot 194 of the 366-word rotation holds blemish. 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.