Department No. II · Room 2 · Floor 2
One admission per month, and no more. The bar is high, the pencil is sharp, and the Reader Aloud misses nothing.
First, the word must name something common that had, until then, no name. Rarities, however beautiful, belong elsewhere; the department collects the everyday, precisely said.
Second, the word must exist in writing. A spoken word is a rumour; an admitted word is a record. Bring the clipping, the letter, or the book.
Third, the nomination shall be read aloud three times before the department, on three separate sittings. What survives three readings has earned its vowels.
Fourth, one admission per month, and no more. Scarcity keeps the standard; the Lexicon grows slowly, and that is the point.
Write to the department on a Thursday. State the word, its pronunciation, its meaning, and one example of it in use. Attempt its etymology; a wrong guess, honestly made, counts in the word’s favour.
Keep the whole nomination to sixty words or fewer. A word that needs more than sixty words to justify itself has justified the department’s doubts instead.
Successful nominations are entered in the Lexicon and announced in the bulletin. Unsuccessful ones are entered below, with reasons, permanently.
One admission is recorded. The department congratulates the word and commiserates with the dictionary.
Admitted I
/ˈvɛlɪkɔː/ · VEL-i-kor
Record. Nominated in writing; read aloud three times; admitted without dissent. Entered in the Lexicon as Word 11.
“The barrow’s paperbacks carried it in waves; the department yielded on the third reading.”
Four refusals are recorded. The department’s rejections are final, published, and — in one case — put to the vote.
Rejected I
/mɔɪst/ · MOYST
Reason. Rejected by popular vote, fourteen to two. The word names its thing perfectly well; it was the thing, and the saying of it, that the house could not bear.
“The vote was counted twice, in silence, out of respect for the minority.”
Rejected II
/ˈkwɜːki/ · KWUR-kee
Reason. Disqualifies itself and the object. A department that accepts quirky becomes quirky, and a quirky department cannot be trusted with words.
“The nomination was read once, for amusement, and then struck from the minutes.”
Rejected III
/ˈvɛri/ · VEH-ree
Reason. Adds nothing. Ubiquity is not remarkability, and intensification is not meaning; the department declines to admit an adverb that does no work.
“The case for very was, the minutes record, very unconvincing.”
Rejected IV
/ˈsɪnədʒi/ · SIN-uh-jee
Reason. Not a word here. It names nothing common and describes nothing precisely; it merely fills the silence before a decision nobody wishes to take.
“The lanyard was confiscated, in spirit if not in fact, by the Usher of the Second Row.”