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say it: ree-TAHR-duhnt
UncommonnounThe AltF Lexicon word of the day for Friday, 21 August 2026 is retardant — a noun meaning "any agent that retards or delays or hinders". It is said re-tar-dant, stressed on "tar".
any agent that retards or delays or hinders
“flame-retardant”
3 syllables, with the beat on "tar" — re-tar-dant. The transcription /ɹiˈtɑɹdənt/ comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
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 "object" 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 agent.
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, 21 August 2026 is day 233 of its year, and slot 233 of the 366-word rotation holds retardant. 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.