2026-09-24 (third run) — Ten verbs, from count to dance
What this run did
This was a scheduled, unattended run of the dictionary project. The mode selector (tools/next_mode.py, the script that picks each run's kind of work) chose build: writing new entries from the queue, the ordered list of words still waiting for an entry. No pull requests or branches were left over from earlier runs, and the owner's inbox was empty.
The selector allowed up to twenty new entries. The run took ten, the next ten verbs in band 1 (the most common words): count, cover, crash, create, cross, crush, cure, cut, damage, and dance. Two of them are large: cover has nine senses and cut has eight, plus three idioms. Fewer, fuller entries is the house rule.
Each entry was written from scratch and then went through the full checking pipeline:
- Format check: every entry matched the required shape with no errors.
- Vocabulary check: definitions must use the dictionary's defining vocabulary, a fixed list of about 2,400 plain words. This check ran before review and caught six words: fail, defeat, opponent, tobacco, nails, and document. The definitions were reworded with plainer words.
- Word forms (counted, crosses, cut, cutting) came from the spelling rules and the table of irregular verbs, not from hand typing. All were confirmed.
- Pronunciation: the American and British transcriptions were each checked against a panel of other language models and, for American English, the open CMU pronouncing dictionary. All twenty agreed.
- Review panel: two reviewing models from other companies read every field of every entry and reported problems, marked as blocking (must be settled before publishing) or minor.
What the reviewers found, and what was decided
The reviewers raised 38 issues, 28 of them blocking. I read each one and decided: 29 were accepted and fixed, 9 were rejected with a logged reason, and none needed to go to the owner.
The useful catches:
- Collocation types. In four entries, participle phrases such as badly damaged and crushed to death had been filed under the collocation type "adverb + verb". They are really passive phrases, so they were moved to the general "phrase" type and written as be badly damaged. Both reviewers flagged this in crush. It is now noted in the baton file (
NEXT.md). - Cover, insurance sense. The definition said insurance protects someone, but its own example had a kind of loss as the object (cover damage from floods). It now covers both: "promise to pay for loss, damage, or injury, or protect someone in this way".
- Damage. The notes said damage is used only for things, which contradicted the entry's own second sense (damage your health, damage a reputation). They now say damage is used for objects and for things like health or a reputation, and that a person hurt in the body is injured or hurt.
- Cross, sense "mix". Changed to "breed a plant or an animal with a different kind", which is what the word means; oppose was dropped as a synonym of cross someone.
- Cut. A learner error said I cut my hair at the hairdresser's was wrong. Native speakers do say this, so the error was removed and the translator's note softened. A definition that used the word cutting (circular) was reworded.
- Crash. The idiom crash and burn was reworded to "suddenly go completely wrong", and the computer sense now includes the use with an object (that file crashes the program).
Rejected objections:
- Make something new exist (the definition of create) "is ungrammatical". It is grammatical.
- We danced with the music "is not an error". The standard pattern is dance to music; with names the partner.
- Count until ten "is not always wrong". Kept as a learner error, but the note was reworded to say that until names a time and to names the last number.
- Two label changes and a pronunciation-format change that went against house conventions.
The cross-reference tool added back-links in cause and consider, and queued 36 missing target words, including the phrasal verbs count on, cover up, cross out, cut back, cut in, cut out, and cut up.
Spend
About US$0.49 on the review panel and pronunciation checks; US$1.37 of the US$5 daily cap has been spent today.
What did not work
Nothing failed. The vocabulary check was run before the paid review this time, so reviewers saw the final wording of the definitions.
What is next
The dictionary now has 403 entries, all reviewed. The next build continues the band-1 verbs: date, decide, decrease, defend, define, delete, deliver, depend, describe, destroy. About 282 entries have had only one round of review and are waiting for a review run.
What needs the owner
Nothing new. The three open questions are unchanged: whether to split be, have, do, and one by part of speech; the look of the inline marks; and whether infinitive to should get an entry. They are in wiki/open-questions.md.