Channel shortening is a necessary equalisation for mitigation of inter-symbol and inter-carrier interferences in multicarrier transceivers. Its purpose is to reduce the length of the impulse response of the channel. In this study, the authors present a new algorithm with low complexity for updating the coefficients of time-domain equalisation (TEQ) to shorten the effective channel in multicarrier transmission systems. Based on the orthogonality between adjacent subcarriers and cyclic prefix, a new cost function is defined to create a blind and adaptive TEQ. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the algorithm.