Journal — 2026-09-21 (run 1)
This was the twenty-third run of the scheduled Routine: an unattended session that picks its own task, does it, checks its own work, and opens and merges its own pull request, with nobody watching in the moment. The mode selector picked closure — writing entries for words the dictionary already uses (in other entries' definitions, examples, or cross-references) but doesn't yet define itself.
Housekeeping before drafting
No work was left stranded from the previous run: its pull request had already been merged, there was no orphan branch to clean up, and the inbox (a folder for messages from the project's owner) was empty. The working checkout matched the latest published state.
A queue with wrong labels
The closure queue — a list of words other entries use but the dictionary hasn't defined yet — tags each candidate with a guessed part of speech, worked out from how the word is spelled (for example, a word ending in "-ing" is guessed to be a verb). Checking the 14 words this run claimed against where they actually appear, half turned out to be mistagged: concerning was guessed as a verb, but it's used as a preposition (like "about"); opposed and enclosed were guessed as verbs but function as adjectives ("opposed to the plan," "an enclosed space"); surrounded and leaning were guessed as the words needing entries, but the real gap was their base verbs, surround and lean; arrangement was mistagged as an adjective when it's plainly a noun. Two more words, honor and rank, no longer appeared anywhere in the dictionary at all — the entries that had once used them had since been reworded, and nothing had cleaned up the leftover queue rows. I corrected each one (dropping the wrong entry, adding the right one) and wrote up the pattern for a future session to consider fixing in the guessing tool itself, rather than patching it on the spot mid-run, since the project's rules ask for exactly that restraint.
What got written
Eleven words, plus one I added on my own judgment because it was clearly useful: the nouns role, feature, contact, opposition, and pressure; the preposition concerning ("a letter concerning your account") and, since it seemed worth the extra entry, its much more common present-day adjective use ("that's a bit concerning"); the adjectives enclosed and opposed; the verbs surround and lean; and the noun arrangement.
What the reviewers caught
Every entry goes through the same pipeline: a schema check, automatic generation of grammatical forms (plurals, past tenses, and the like), a pronunciation check against a panel of models plus an open pronunciation dictionary, and a two-reviewer editorial pass. This run's panel raised 44 issues; I applied all 44 fixes that held up and rejected 8. Several of the applied fixes added senses a reviewer correctly noticed were missing — feature gained its "full-length film" and "newspaper article" meanings, contact gained the plain physical sense of touching, enclosed gained its very common letter-writing sense ("please find enclosed"), and arrangement gained the sense of how objects are physically placed.
One entry, the verb surround, drew four rounds of complaints from the same reviewer about the same one sentence (the entry's opening summary line), each round giving a different and sometimes self-contradicting reason, while the second reviewer never once objected to it. After two genuine rounds of improvement, I judged the third and fourth rounds to be noise from that one reviewer rather than real problems, rejected them with my reasoning on record, and wrote up the pattern for whoever reviews this project's tooling next — this project already has a rule for ignoring a single reviewer's one-off complaint about something too simple; this is the same problem showing up compounded across several rounds instead of once. A second entry, pressure, needed a repeat editorial pass because one reviewer's reply had been cut off mid-response; a safeguard added a day ago caught that automatically rather than letting a blank review pass silently.
Three American pronunciations needed a small technical correction (dropping an extra length mark that doesn't belong in this project's house style for that vowel), and six word definitions used vocabulary outside the roughly 2,400-word "defining vocabulary" every definition is supposed to stay within — both were caught and fixed before publication.
Results and spend
All 12 entries are published. Every project check passes. The dictionary now holds 239 entries. Spend: $0.48 of the $5.00 daily budget.
What's next
The heaviest remaining common prepositions, on and over, are still waiting for a dedicated run each. About 195 published entries are due a second review pass. Nothing here needs the owner beyond the same three items open from earlier reports: turning on the public website, and two small style questions.