About Lexography

Lexography — A Cartography of Wandering Meanings. Public Alpha · Corpus One · 100 Word Journeys. An independent project by Mark Anil Mathew.

Reading a journey

Each stage names a particular form, language and sense. An arrow means a supported linguistic relationship. It does not prove that a person, book or shipment followed the line on the map.

The map uses regional reference points from Glottolog. These are approximate language locations, not birthplaces of words. Modern Natural Earth borders help you find your bearings; they are not historical language boundaries. Unmapped stages remain available in Lineage, the Journey of meaning and the definition cards.

Time, without invented precision

The Journey of meaning is an editorial reading order. The gaps between forms do not measure elapsed time or historical diffusion. Select a transition to inspect its evidence. “c.” means circa: approximately. Where an exact written date is unavailable, a century, textual period or historical context can give a sense of time. “By” gives a latest-possible date, not a starting date. Evidence explains whether each label dates a written example, a language or text, a historical context, or a bound inferred from a borrowing account.

These contextual periods are not first attestations, and broad ranges do not establish continuous use throughout every year. Dates without a defensible basis remain undated. A first known written use can change with new discoveries and is not the actual origin.

Pronunciation guides

The readable guide is an English approximation of a cited pronunciation. Capitals indicate stress where supported; lowercase guides leave stress unspecified. The evidence provides the IPA, language variety and limitations. A present-day reading shown beside an old date is not a reconstruction of pronunciation in that year. Historical dictionary readings are labeled as conventions or reconstructions. Missing readings stay unverified.

More than a family tree

Borrowing transfers a word between languages. Inheritance carries it through language change. Derivation makes a form from other forms; a compound can have multiple contributors. A calque translates a formation or meaning. Semantic change develops a new sense. Cognacy indicates a shared ancestry, without making one form the other's parent. Influence may change a spelling without being ancestry.

Lineage retains every recorded contributor and alternative. Dashed connections indicate qualified or alternative accounts; they do not encode semantic change. Qualified and alternative relationships are labeled, not ranked with numerical confidence.

A bounded, source-linked collection

This Public Alpha contains 200 English word journeys and selected earlier forms. Words move through languages, places, periods and meanings; routes represent documented lexical evidence, not cultural ownership. Lexical Gravity is relative to this corpus, not a measure of real-world linguistic importance. It is not a universal dictionary. Separate etymologies and senses retain their own identifiers. For example, the robot journey covers the artificial-worker sense, not the earlier English word for a forced-labor system; tea covers the drink, not every homograph or slang sense.

Choose Evidence or View evidence for a stage to find the claim, source and precise locator. Lexical claims, dates and geographic references have separate provenance. A Wiktionary page and its extracted copy are one source, not independent corroboration. Dates may be attestations or contextual bounds rather than exact origin dates, and uncertainty stays visible where evidence is incomplete.

Following the evidence

Each claim opens into a source, a selected passage, a qualification and what Lexography infers. Quotations, structured reference records and source summaries are labeled separately. A qualification explains limits or disagreement; it is not a numerical confidence score. The interpretation describes what we chose to draw or say, without promoting that choice into source text.

Review status

This edition was enriched and reviewed by an agent on 13 September 2026. Earlier evidence retains its individual source and access date. The entries have not received human or expert review. “Published” in the downloadable dataset means included in this local build, not endorsed by a scholar. Restricted dictionary pages are linked with brief attributed excerpts; no full restricted articles are redistributed.

Attribution & reuse

Lexical source material: English Wiktionary contributors. The adapted pilot data and editorial journey text are available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes include selection, normalization, original summaries, evidence qualification and linked display states. The data retain per-claim attribution and revision links.

Regional reference points: Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; and Bank, Sebastian (2026), Glottolog 5.3, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, CC BY 4.0. Selected coordinates are used for orientation only.

Basemap: Natural Earth, public domain, distributed by world-atlas 2.0.2. Projections and map navigation: D3. Graph layout: Dagre. Static pages: Astro and React. Fonts: Noto Sans, Playfair Display, Noto Sans Arabic and Noto Sans Devanagari, SIL Open Font License. Dependency license notices.

Download the versioned pilot dataset. Source title, publisher, URL, access date, revision where available, reuse conditions and claim locators travel with it.