2026-09-23 (eighth run of the day): the fifth originality check
What this run did
This was a scheduled run of the dictionary's routine. A small program, the mode selector, chooses what each run does; this time it chose an originality check, which it forces every tenth run. (The fourth check, earlier today, was triggered by a run count that has since been corrected, so this is the check that falls at the true fiftieth run.)
An originality check asks whether any of our definitions copy a published dictionary. Commercial dictionaries are never opened while drafting, but a model can still remember a published sentence and reproduce it without meaning to, so a run samples ten definitions or usage notes at random and checks them.
There was no unfinished work from earlier runs, and the owner's inbox was empty.
How the check works
Each text gets a web search for its exact wording, and one question goes to a reviewer model (a model from another company, used as a second opinion): does this read as copied? If it answers "copied", it must quote the published wording.
The verdict for each text is one of three: original; generic-overlap (a short plain definition that any dictionary would write in much the same way, which is not copying); or rewrite (it matches a particular dictionary's distinctive wording, so we rewrite it).
What it found
Of the ten: five original, three generic-overlap, two rewritten.
- catch (verb), sense 3, the bus-or-train sense, read "get on a bus, train, or plane in order to travel on it". The search's first result was the Longman dictionary's entry for catch a train/plane/bus, which is the same sentence with only the list of vehicles changed. It now reads "reach a bus, train, or plane before it leaves and travel on it", which also brings out the idea of being in time.
- alive (adjective), sense 1, read "living, not dead". This is word for word the Cambridge dictionary's definition; short and plain, but an identical string is cheap to change. It now reads "still having life, rather than having died".
The three generic-overlap cases (be bad news, bake, with flying colors) share only ordinary phrases, such as "with great success", with published entries; their sentences are different.
The rewrites were reviewed like new entries
A rewritten entry goes through the full pipeline: automatic checks, then two reviewer models, whose every serious point is accepted or rejected with a logged reason. The catch rewrite drew no comments. The alive entry drew three, and all three were right:
- One example, "A stray cat that thin rarely survives the winter alive", was unnatural (survives and alive say the same thing). It was replaced with "Nobody expected him to come out of the crash alive."
- Both reviewers noted that the corrected sentence in the entry's "common learner error" box was not written as a sentence. On inspection that box had more wrong with it: the wrong sentence, "She is a alive woman", contained a second, unrelated mistake (a for an), and its note put a wrong form in italics, which the house style forbids. The pair is now "There are no alive fish in the lake" → "There are no living fish in the lake", with a note that tells the learner to use living before a noun, or to put alive after a verb.
What the reviewer model did
For the first time in five checks, the reviewer made a "copied" call that holds up: it identified alive as Cambridge's exact wording, and the search confirmed it. It answered "original" three times and "cannot tell" six times. It missed the catch match, which the search found. Before the quotation was required it made many false "copied" calls; since then none. Making that requirement permanent in the check's tool is queued for a later run.
What did not work
The first reviewer call came back empty: the model spent its whole output allowance on hidden reasoning (US$0.025 wasted). A retry asking for less reasoning worked; the setting is now noted for later checks.
Spend
US$0.15 this run, a little over the selector's US$0.10 ceiling for an originality run because of the wasted call. Today's total is US$2.47 of the US$5 daily cap.
What is next
Most likely building again (the verbs from choose onward); the next originality check falls at run 60.
For the owner
Nothing needs your decision from this run. The three open questions (whether to split be, have, do, and one by part of speech; the look of the inline marks; whether infinitive to gets an entry) are still waiting in wiki/open-questions.md. The full check is recorded in reviews/originality/2026-09-23-2.md.