2026-09-23 (seventh run of the day): ten new entries, neither and nine verbs
What this run did
This was a scheduled, unattended run of the dictionary. At the start of each run a small program, the mode selector (tools/next_mode.py), picks one kind of work. Today it picked build, which means writing new entries from the queue of words still to be written.
Pre-flight found nothing left over: no unmerged pull request, no abandoned branch, no new message in inbox/.
The run could have written twenty entries. It wrote ten, because five of the verbs are large, many-meaning words; the house rule is fewer, better entries:
- neither as a conjunction (the neither ... nor pair), which an earlier review had moved out of the determiner entry. The either ... or entry now points here.
- The verbs care (four meanings, plus the idioms couldn't care less, for all I care, who cares?), carry (eight), catch (nine, plus catch it), cause (two), celebrate (three), change (six), charge (six), check (five), and chew (two).
Each entry went through the full pipeline before publication:
- The inflection tool generated the verb forms; all verified.
- The pronunciation check compared our transcriptions with a panel of other models and an open pronouncing dictionary; all 20 verified.
- Two reviewer models from other companies (called reviewer-a and reviewer-b) read every field.
- I adjudicated every issue they raised, applying or rejecting it, and logged each decision.
What the reviewers found and what I decided
The reviewers raised 36 issues, 30 of them marked blocking. I applied 29 and rejected 7. Reviewer-b raised only two, both agreeing with reviewer-a.
The useful catches:
- catch: The definition of the "stop escaping" meaning said the animal was trying to escape, which left out catching fish. It now reads take hold of a person or an animal and stop them from getting away.
- catch: The "discover" meaning left out You won't catch me eating there again, where nothing wrong is being done.
- catch: Two meanings (catch the news, I didn't catch your name) carried an informal label they do not need. Both reviewers said so.
- Wrong synonyms: sell is not a synonym of carry in the sense of a shop having goods for sale. bring on its own is not a synonym of cause; that link now points at bring about.
- care: The note on care to claimed it is used only after would, but the entry's own example (if anyone cares to look) showed otherwise.
- chew and charge: Reworded for accuracy. chew is now bite again and again without swallowing it, so chewing gum fits. charge for a battery now says become filled with electricity.
The rejections, each with a logged reason:
- Splitting catch in I didn't catch your name into separate "hear" and "understand" meanings. Learners need no different definition, grammar, or translation.
- The claim that change the baby does not mean putting on a clean diaper. It does.
- The claim that a hedged note about a common false friend is too broad. The note (a word like control means check in several languages) is hedged, as the style guide asks.
- The claim that check meaning "put a mark next to" should not be labelled American. Our region labels mean mainly used there, and British English usually says tick.
- Two smaller objections, on celebrate and chew.
One more check caught a problem after review. The vocabulary check makes sure definitions use only the dictionary's list of about 2,400 plain defining words. It found gene and diaper in two definitions, and neither word has an entry yet. I reworded both definitions to use listed words.
What did not work
Reviewer-b sent back cut-off replies on two of the larger entries, catch and chew, so its reviews were empty. I re-ran reviewer-b alone on those two, and this morning's tool fix replaced the empty records cleanly. Worth watching on large verbs.
Spend
The run spent US$0.46 on paid model calls: pronunciation checks and the two reviewers. Today's total is US$2.32 of the US$5 daily cap.
What is next
- The next run will probably be the periodic originality check, which searches the web for our definitions to make sure none match a published dictionary. It is due at the fiftieth counted run.
- After that, building continues with the band-1 verbs choose, chop, clean, climb, close, collect, come....
- There is also a backlog of about 262 entries that have had only one round of review.
What needs you
Nothing new. The three open questions from earlier runs still stand, in wiki/open-questions.md:
- whether to split be, have, do, and one by part of speech;
- how the inline marks should look;
- whether infinitive to should get an entry.
Nothing was added to the curator list this run.