Journal — 2026-09-19 (run 11 of the day)
This was the thirteenth scheduled run of the TKG English Learner's Dictionary project overall — an original English-English dictionary written for language learners, built one entry (a headword plus its part of speech) at a time as a JSON file. Each run is unattended: a script picks the type of work based on how much of each kind is overdue, does that work, checks it, and merges its own changes without anyone watching live.
Housekeeping before drafting
Pre-flight checks were clean: no pull request left open from a previous run, no abandoned work branches (only main exists on the shared repository besides this run's own branch), nothing waiting in the inbox. The checkout matched the latest shared state before work began.
Why this run did markup, not new entries
The mode selector chose review. Normally "review" means giving a second reading to entries that have only been checked once. But there were no such entries left waiting; instead, 23 large, many-sense entries (big, good, time, make, and so on) were still carrying a flag called markup-pending. That flag traces back to a ruling the project owner made on 2026-09-18: certain words inside definitions and notes need small typographic marks — bold when a word is being named as a word (as in "big means large"), and italics when a phrase is shown as an example inside running text (as in "think big, win big"). These marks help a learner tell at a glance when a word is being talked about versus used. Most of the dictionary's oldest entries, written before that ruling, still lack the marks, and the rule is that they get added by hand, one field at a time, never by an automatic script — a script cannot reliably tell whether a given occurrence of a word is being named or just used.
The eight entries converted
This run worked through the flagged entries in order of file size, smallest first, since these are large, multi-sense entries and doing them carefully takes real reading. Eight were finished and had their flag removed: the noun x-ray, the verb and noun forms of record, and the nouns news, people, and family, plus the adjectives big and old.
Because these entries had already been through the normal review pipeline in earlier runs (transcriptions, two independent reviewers, adjudication), no new review round was needed here — the unit of work was purely the hand-marking itself, checked field by field against the style guide and against dozens of already-marked entries to keep the convention consistent. A few judgment calls came up repeatedly: a noun's plain "An x-ray is..." definition is left unmarked, since it is just describing the thing, not talking about the word; but a verb's "To record something is..." or an adjective's "Big means..." does get the headword bolded, since that phrasing is explicitly about the word's meaning. When one entry mentions another word for comparison (a "compare" note), only the newly introduced word is bolded, not the entry's own headword. And example-style phrases embedded in running prose — even ones with placeholders like "record something" — are italicized just as much as concrete examples like "a large family."
Checking the work
Every changed file was re-validated (0 errors), checked against the approved definition vocabulary (only pre-existing, non-blocking notices about words used in examples and side notes, unrelated to this run's changes), and passed through the cross-reference tool, which found no problems beyond already-known gaps. The project's full closing checks all passed: format and word-count limits, internal link integrity, all 292 automated tests, and the vocabulary and cross-reference gates.
What's next
Fifteen large entries still carry the markup-pending flag — house, go, good, bank, see, shit, get, take, color, head, thing, way, water, make, and time — and are queued for the same treatment in size order in upcoming runs. No entries reviewed only once remain outstanding beyond that set. A batch of released pronoun words and the closure backlog (words the dictionary already points to but hasn't written yet) remain next in line after that. A general quality pass ("lint") is due in about one more run.
This run needed no paid model calls, since the work was hand markup rather than drafting or panel review. Spending today remains $3.20 of the $5.00 daily limit, unchanged by this run.