Stewardship
Who keeps this, and on whose behalf.
Recording where a word comes from is making a claim about a community. So the honest thing to publish next to that claim is how close the person making it actually stands to that community. That answer is different for every variety in this dictionary, which is why it is written out for each one rather than summarised once at the bottom of a page.
Where I stand, variety by variety
I am one person, not an institution and not a community. Nothing below is a credential. It is a disclosure, so a reader never has to guess who is speaking about whose language.
United States
I am African, not African-American. This is an act of solidarity on a global issue, not a claim of ownership. Corrections from African-American speakers take precedence over anything recorded here, including over me.
Nigeria and its diaspora
I am African but not Nigerian. Sharing a continent is not sharing a community, and every entry here is recorded from outside this one.
Cape Town and the Western Cape, South Africa
I am South African but not from the Cape Coloured community. Same country, different community. Proximity is not standing: nothing here is written from inside this variety, and where I have it wrong, its speakers are right.
Durban and KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
I am South African but not Indian South African. Same country, different community, and a history I can cite but cannot speak for.
Gauteng townships, South Africa
Of the varieties here, these are the ones spoken closest to where I live. That is geography, not membership: township varieties are not one thing, and being South African makes none of them mine. Where I am wrong about a term, the correction stands over me.
What counts as evidence
Sources are ordered by how close they sit to the people who actually use the word, not by academic prestige. A speaker explaining their own usage outranks a newspaper explaining it for them.
- First use: the documented earliest instance itself.
- Community explanation: a speaker of the variety explaining their own language.
- Scholarship: linguists who study the variety.
- Dictionary, then press. These are evidence about a word’s spread, not about its origin, and an entry built only on them cannot reach the top of the ladder.
Three rules I cannot quietly break
These are enforced by the software, not by my good intentions. A submission that breaks one is rejected before it reaches the record.
- Communities do not have coining events. A community can never be recorded as having invented a word, because that would manufacture a moment the evidence does not support. Most slang has no coiner, and saying so is an answer, not a gap.
- A community credit has to be checkable. “Black people” is not an attribution, it is a shrug with a demographic attached. A credit names a region, an era or a scene.
- Unverified never looks verified. Only an entry traced to a named primary source is marked sourced, and only a sourced entry is allowed into search engines. Everything below that is visibly a draft.
Corrections
Corrections from speakers of a variety take precedence over anything recorded here, including over me. Every entry carries a correction link.
Right now a correction opens an issue on the public repository, which is a deliberate limit rather than a finished design: an open submission form without identity checks is a false-attribution machine, and that work has not been done yet. When it is, corrections become events on the ledger like everything else. Until then the current rung is stated plainly so nobody mistakes it for the destination.
Nothing here is monetised
No advertising, no paywall, no affiliate links on any entry. The content is open under CC BY-SA 4.0, with attribution to the speech communities the words come from. Any future revenue would need named community agreement, recorded on the ledger where anyone can check it. A dictionary that criticises extraction and then quietly monetises the extracted thing has argued itself out of existence.
Handover
The intention is that this outlives my involvement, and the architecture is unusual in a way that makes that credible rather than sentimental.
Every entry, every revision, every verification decision and every person who made one sits in an append-only, hash-chained log. Anyone can verify the whole chain at the integrity endpoint without asking my permission or taking my word for anything.
That means a successor does not inherit a reputation. They inherit a checkable record: they can audit every decision I made before accepting the thing. Stewardship here is transferable precisely because it never required trusting the steward.