Lexonomy

A hierarchical ontology of English vocabulary in which every placement is an adjudicated argument — and the placement order has been tested against empirical age-of-acquisition norms.

Lexonomy is a corpus of ~6,000 parent–child–qualifier triples ("slips") organizing English words into a single derivation tree rooted in thirteen primes. Its distinguishing property is not size but adjudication density: every edge was individually argued under a written constitution, every mutation carries its own provenance and undo, and the corpus's central structural claim was measured against the Kuperman age-of-acquisition norms (31,105 words).

The empirical result

The corpus's ordering law — Temporal Coherence — holds that a parent concept should not be demonstrably younger than its child: the hierarchy should recapitulate the chronological growth of language. This is a testable claim, and it was tested:

• Every placement was swept against the Kuperman AoA norms (Kuperman, Stadthagen-Gonzalez & Brysbaert, 2012; 31,105 words) with a 2.0-year margin.
• The sweep produced 492 corrections, each individually adjudicated by the human curator with the engine's full argument on record.
• Measured TC debt fell from 808 to 429 suspect placements; the remaining floor is nonzero by design (human-cleared dismissals stay counted as data-suspect forever — the metric gauges the data condition, not the adjudication).

Correction notes survive in the notes column, so the reasoning behind each AoA-driven change is inspectable row by row.

The framework

The generative rule ("Bellis's Law"): every non-prime concept equals a parent word plus a differentiating qualifier —

child = parent⟨qualifier⟩

The qualifier is a subtraction, not an addition: it names what distinguishes this child from its siblings under the same parent. A placement succeeds when the fully qualified breadcrumb from child to prime reads as a stepwise definition.

Thirteen primes form the floor (stored with parent = [prime]): the five physical senses (smell, taste, hear, see, touch); six intellectual prime concepts (you, thing, here, is, now, do), corresponding to who/what/where/why/when/how; and yes, no. Primes are generated, not carved; everything above them is subsetting.

The framework deliberately underdetermines the tree: two competent curators can disagree about a placement. Lexonomy's aim is to make such disagreements atomic and arguable — one edge, one qualifier, one verdict — rather than to claim oracle answers.

Data structure

One CSV, one row per slip.

column	meaning
child	the word being placed
parent	its parent word, or the sentinel [prime] (root by design, 13 rows). A second sentinel, [orphan] (placed, parent not yet ruled), is defined by the schema but currently empty — every non-prime row has a parent
qualifier	the differentiating word (bare canonical value — no bracket notation in the data)
qual_kind	the qualifier's class: operator (ordinary lexical subtraction), variant (mechanical/grammatical derivation, e.g. maker = make⟨noun⟩), negation (total subtraction: the child is the parent's direct negation), or empty (unqualified — a standing work item, not a claim)
category	curator's category tag, where assigned
session_id	provenance tag for the pass that last ruled the row
notes	full curation trail: prior placements (was parent⟨qualifier⟩), law citations, AoA arguments, recorded dissents ([alt: …]). Append-only; loose text by design
status, gm_*, wl_*	internal worklist/game flags; safe to ignore for analysis
created_at	row creation timestamp

Notation appearing in the data. Word values are bare strings with two conventions: square-bracket sentinels occur only in parent ([prime], [orphan], documented above), and a parenthesized sense tag disambiguates polysemes in child/parent — e.g. scale(weight) vs. scale, feel(perceive), marked(adjective) (37 rows). The notes column additionally uses the shorthand parent✖qualifier to cite placements compactly — music✖lyrical means "music qualified by lyrical"; a (was parent✖qualifier) clause records the placement a correction replaced.

Kind census at export: operator 4,326 · variant 1,412 · negation 156 · unqualified 78.

A note on synonymy: rows with qualifier synonym (kind variant) store a peer relationship by database contrivance — the less-common term is filed under the more-common one for storage convenience, but no subordination is claimed. True synonymy proved rare in practice.

Method: constitutional human–AI curation

The corpus was curated by a single human curator working with an LLM engine under a written constitution — a fixed document of laws (temporal coherence; the least-claiming word upstream; qualifier economy; differential duty within a family; synonym skepticism; no cycles; authorized insertion of missing generations) sent with every engine call. The process:

• The family (one parent and all its children), not the slip, is the unit of adjudication — a qualifier's job is defined relative to its siblings.
• Batch passes ran two independent draws per family; only consensus committed. Keep-vs-change disagreement resolved to incumbency with the dissent recorded ([alt: …] in notes); change-vs-change routed to the human.
• Certificates, not attendance: a family counts as done only when every slip was adjudicated; certificates are recorded claims that can be challenged and re-run.
• The human curator is the highest court; the engine drafts and argues, the curator rules.

The full constitution is included in this repository (CURATION_CONSTITUTION.md) both as documentation and as a reusable methodology artifact for AI-assisted corpus curation with auditable human authority.

Intended uses

• Computational lexical resources: a small, densely adjudicated complement to WordNet-scale resources; every edge carries its argument.
• Language acquisition / psycholinguistics: the TC-vs-AoA sweep is a worked example of testing a hand-built hierarchy against acquisition norms; the corrections are labeled training/evaluation material for placement-ordering models.
• Lexical semantics: a corpus of ~6,000 minimal-differentia judgments (which single word distinguishes fracture from crack?) with recorded alternatives and dissents.
• Human–AI methodology research: a complete, documented instance of constitutional LLM curation with provenance.

Limitations

• Single curator. All final rulings are one person's; the constitution and per-row dissent trail are the check, not a second judge. Inter-annotator agreement is an open experiment (the repository owner welcomes it).
• English only, and the AoA validation inherits the coverage limits of the Kuperman norms.
• The core framework is axiomatic. The prime roster and the qualifier-as-subtraction rule are stipulated, not derived; the empirically tested component is the placement ordering (Temporal Coherence).
• 78 rows are unqualified (placement filed, differentia not yet ruled) — visible work state, not noise. Every non-prime row has a parent (no orphans at publication).

Links

• Live application: lexonomy.org — the corpus browsable as an interactive tree, with curation worklists.
• Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (2012). Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(4), 978–990.

Citation

@misc{bellis2026lexonomy,
  author = {Bellis, Jack},
  title  = {Lexonomy: a hierarchical vocabulary ontology with age-of-acquisition-validated placement order},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://lexonomy.org}
}

License

CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication) — free to use, share, and adapt for any purpose, no attribution required. Citation is appreciated but not a condition.