To provide an alkaline dry battery that is excellent in discharge characteristics under a heavy load after storage at high temperature and suppresses polarization in pulse discharge under a heavy load, used is a nickel oxyhydroxide which is obtained by oxidizing a nickel hydroxide having a half width of a (101) face of 0.6 to 0.8 deg./2¸ and a half width of a (001) face of 0.5 to 0.7 deg./2¸ in powder X-ray diffraction, and which has an average nickel valence of 2.95 or more and an average particle diameter of 8 to 18 µm.
