2026-09-23 (fifth run): a second reading of twenty determiners
What this run did
This was the fifty-third scheduled run, and it was a review run. The mode selector (tools/next_mode.py, which picks the most overdue kind of work) chose it because 272 published entries had been read by the outside reviewers only once.
No leftover pull request (a batch of changes waiting to be merged) or stray branch was found, and the owner's inbox was empty.
The block was the twenty oldest once-reviewed entries. All twenty are determiners, the small words that go before a noun to say which one or how many: each, few, half, her, his, its, least, less, little, many, more, most, much, my, neither, no, other, our, several, such. Each went back to the review panel (two reviewer models from other companies, which mark every field "ok" or raise a blocking or minor issue); the run then decided every issue itself (apply, reject with a reason, or escalate to the owner) and logged it in reviews/decisions.jsonl.
What the reviewers found and what was decided
The panel raised 42 issues, 32 of them blocking. The run applied 25, rejected 17, and escalated none. Seven entries (half, her, his, less, my, no, such) came back with no issue at all, and its had only one minor one.
Changes made:
- least: the definition said it is used "when three or more amounts are being compared"., too strict for with the least effort; removed from the definition, explanation, and comparison note.
- more or less: the definition covered only "about", but one of its own examples (We're more or less finished) means "nearly". The definition now covers both.
- most: two examples used most of the .... Under the house rule, that is the pronoun, not the determiner (the rule that already sends each of us to the each pronoun entry). Both examples were replaced with plain determiner uses, and the explanation now points to the pronoun entry.
- much: the entry said bare much before a noun is common after very. Very much time is not normal English, so very was removed from that list.
- other: the definition said the word goes only before plural or uncountable nouns, yet one example was some other time. The explanation now says a singular noun needs some, any or no first; an overlong signpost (the short sense label) was shortened.
- neither ... nor: this pair had been a phrase inside the determiner entry. Its twin, either ... or, already has its own conjunction entry, so neither ... nor was moved out. The determiner entry now points to nor, and a new neither (conjunction) entry was added to the queue.
- Smaller fixes: its lost a raw phonetic symbol (now "rhyming with hits"). Our no longer claims a two-syllable pronunciation is common when stressed. A good many now says "people or things", not "something". Little no longer lists a little bit, which is mostly an adverb.
Rejected, with reasons logged:
- Reviewer-a asked for a long-vowel mark in the American transcriptions of each and few; the house style leaves it out, and the open CMU pronouncing dictionary agrees.
- Several objections treated each of us and neither of them as determiner uses. By house convention they belong to the pronoun entries, which exist.
- Requests to move at least, at most and more or less out of their entries were rejected. Idioms live under their keyword entry whatever its part of speech.
- A claim that several can mean two, and a request to label a good many as formal, were both rejected.
Reviewer-a was right in about half of its calls this run and reviewer-b in four out of five., in line with the long-running pattern.
What did not work
Reviewer-b's reply on least was cut off partway through, so it had to be run again. The re-run repeated a known tool fault: it wrote duplicate review records into the entry's history. It was cleaned up by hand, and the tooling note records the recurrence; the fix is still due.
Spend
The panel cost US$0.47 of this run's US$1.25 limit, which brings today's total to US$1.86 of the US$5 daily cap.
What is next
The five-run maintenance pass (lint) is due and will probably be the next run. After that, building resumes with the band-1 verbs and the new neither (conjunction) entry. 252 entries are still waiting for their second reading.
What needs the owner
Nothing new. Three open questions are still waiting in wiki/open-questions.md: whether be/have/do/one should be split by part of speech, how the inline marks should look, and whether infinitive to should get an entry. Fourteen items sit in reviews/needs_curator.txt; none were added this run.