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say it: uhn-ROO-lee
FamiliaradjectiveThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Monday, 27 July 2026 is unruly — an adjective meaning "noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline". It is said un-ru-ly, stressed on "ru".
noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline
“a boisterous crowd”
“a social gathering that became rambunctious and out of hand”
“a robustious group of teenagers”
“beneath the rumbustious surface of his paintings is sympathy for the vulnerability of ordinary human beings”
“an unruly class”
unruly 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 "ru" — un-ru-ly. The transcription /ənˈɹuli/ 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 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, 27 July 2026 is day 208 of its year, and slot 208 of the 366-word rotation holds unruly. 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.