The Dictionary

The Dictionary is an authoritative in-world lexicon. Its entries present multiple senses for a term and note how meanings vary across historical and disciplinary forms of Orth. The cited 4th edition (A.R. 3000) sometimes records brief historical notes and scholarly positions on how a term has been understood.

First Appearance and Context

Quotations attribute entries to "THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000." An early example is the headword Extramuros, which lays out numbered senses and tags them by Orth tradition.

Roles/Actions and Affiliations

• Serves as an in-text authority for usage within the mathic world, distinguishing senses by era and discipline in Orth.
• Notes orthography, abbreviations, or pronunciation where helpful, and occasionally appends historical context or scholarly viewpoints.

Relationships

• Cited by avout and narrators as a standard reference; no compiler, editor, or sponsoring order has been identified in the material available so far.
• Individual entries may allude to maths, concents, orders, and historical periods; these are treated as contextual signals rather than as attributions of authorship.

Descriptions/Characteristics

• Citation style appears in uppercase ("THE DICTIONARY") with edition and date (e.g., "4th edition, A.R. 3000").
• Entries are structured as numbered senses that track shifts across periods of Orth. Selected examples:
• Ita: defined across periods with both linguistic and institutional senses. In late Praxic Orth it is an acronym (sometimes written ITA) with disputed expansion; in early New Orth (up to the Second Sack) it denotes a faculty of a concent devoted to the praxis of syntactic devices; in later New Orth it names a proscribed artisanal caste tolerated in the thirty-seven concents built around the Great Clocks, segregated from the avout.
• Extramuros: used to illustrate how a single headword’s meaning can range from the literal “outside the walls” to senses that contrast the non‑mathic world with life inside a math, depending on period and context.

Current Status/Location

Known through cited excerpts; the compilers and physical location of the work have not been specified.