2026-09-18: your feedback on the seed set, turned into rules, tools, and corrected entries
This report covers one session of the TKG English Learner's Dictionary, run on 2026-09-18 to act on the file you dropped into inbox/ (the folder where you leave notes for the project). It stands on its own; the previous report is journal/2026-09-17.md.
What the session did
Your note had two parts: your request that words used as words, quoted phrases, and the headword inside example sentences be visibly marked, which needs tags in the entry files; and four observations from a Japanese colleague on the entries for another and money. Both are now written rules, enforced wherever a program can enforce them.
Marking words. Two marks now go into the entry files' plain text: double asterisks around a word named as a word (**all** goes before a plural noun) and single asterisks around a phrase quoted to show use (*all the students*). The site shows the first in bold and the second in italics. The third case, the headword inside an example sentence, is not tagged by the writer: the site finds the headword and its inflected, variant, and contracted forms and sets them in bold when the pages are built. Where the automatic rule cannot find the form (are under be, a separated pick it up), the writer marks it by hand, and the validator, the program that checks every entry file, warns about any example without a form of its headword. The validator also rejects malformed marks, and the reviewers are told the marks are house style. The design is in wiki/decisions/inline-markup.md; the writer's rule is section 6 of the style guide.
The colleague's points. Pronunciation notes are now written in plain words for an intermediate learner (a sound compared with a familiar word, stress shown by a respelling such as uh-NUTH-er); the validator rejects terms such as schwa, and seven notes were rewritten. An entry must agree with itself, and a claim about a word's origin may appear only in the etymology field, verified against two open sources: the "a plus other" slip in another was an unverified origin claim in an explanation. A use that belongs to a different part of speech gets its own entry, never a sense or a remark inside this one: another standing alone (I'll have another) is a pronoun, so the determiner entry now points to a queued another (pronoun); likewise all (pronoun), alone (adverb), and favorite (noun). A grammar rule with a real exception names the exception as one: money is uncountable in ordinary use; monies belongs to legal documents. The colleague also found the entries about the right length and suggested a link to a Japanese-English dictionary; that is what the per-language slots in each entry are for. These rules are in wiki/decisions/part-of-speech-and-consistency.md, the style guide, and the reviewer prompt, which now also judges the whole entry's consistency.
The entries. No program may rewrite a prose field, so the marks were added by hand to 40 of the 82 entries: the three model entries, every function word, the four unfinished drafts, and the three entries your note named. The other 42 carry the flag markup-pending; the scheduled runs convert them in blocks of 20 during the second review reading every seed entry is due anyway.
Checks and spend
Every entry passes the validator with no errors; the vocabulary, cross-reference, link, and cap checks pass; all 289 unit tests pass, 15 new; the site was rebuilt and passed its 54 browser checks. No paid model call was made; spend US$0.00.
What did not go smoothly
The mark checker and the style guide briefly contradicted each other on one detail; the checker was wrong and was fixed, with a test. One validator warning remains by design: an example under the phrase kill time says an hour to kill and so contains no form of time.
What is next
The scheduled Routine can now be turned on. Its first review run finishes the four drafts and starts converting the flagged entries; its build runs draft new entries under the new rules.
What needs you
- The three items from the last report still stand: enable GitHub Pages (Settings, Pages, Source: "GitHub Actions"); schedule the Routine on Sonnet 5 with the one-line prompt Read
routine-prompt.mdin the repository root and follow it exactly; decide whether drafting moves to a flagship model (assumption: it stays in-session). - The seed entries for be, have, and do carry their auxiliary uses as senses, and one its pronoun uses, against the new part-of-speech rule. Should they be split into separate entries? Assumption: no, until you say so (question 4 in
wiki/open-questions.md). - The marks are shown in bold and italics. A colour or another weight is one line of stylesheet each; the data does not change.