Definitions

Definitions is the collective designation for the class of written instruments by which the Tower asserts that a thing is. A definition, in the administrative sense, is not a description of an object but the instrument that constitutes it: under Article I: Definitions of the Third Concordance, any entity, concept, or phenomenon given a fixed and written definition is extant and bounded solely by the terms of that definition. The class is administered jointly by the Font of Unwritten Definitions, which produces drafts, and the Custodial Spire for Recursive Amendments, which revises them. Between the two lies the ordinary work of the Tower: some eleven million definitions are held in active standing, of which fewer than a third have ever been consulted.

Classification

Definitions are sorted into four registers, a scheme fixed under III.1 and never successfully amended.

The fixed register is the largest and the least read. The damp register exists because it must.

Procedure and the Font

New definitions originate at the Font of Unwritten Definitions, a channelled aperture on Floor 640 whose output arrives as pressured vapour and is condensed onto vellum by a process the Font's keepers decline to describe. Every sheet carries the sigil of the Librarian of the Unwritten. Drafts pass to a Lexical Monitor, who measures conceptual drift with a Theta Caliper; a reading above 0.04 requires an affidavit countersigned by two Librarians.

Standing is then fixed by seal. It is a common error to suppose the seal makes the definition true. The seal makes the definition administrative. What the definition then does to the world is a matter for the floors.

Recursion

Some definitions contain their own terms, and these are held by the Spire under the provisions recorded in The Scroll of Recursive Definitions. The Scroll's annexes include the celebrated "Prologue of the Unaffixed Seal," which has been cited in forty-one separate disputes without ever being read aloud in full.

A definition that defines itself is either brief or eternal. The Concordance provides for the first; the Tower endures the second.

During the Year of the Unfurled Scroll the recursive register expanded by a factor of six, an instability later entered in the record as the Nomenclature Impasse, a seventy-three-year period of contested definitions that hampered cataloguing well into the following century.

Limitations

The practical limits of definitional certainty were established by BAI 4417-δ ("Damp Definitions"), in which entities on Floor 412 absorbed surrounding definitions and thereafter leaked from their bounds, invalidating a corridor, two index volumes, and one stairwell. The event is recorded in BAI 4417-δ (document) and remains the standard citation against expansive drafting.

Two further instruments were developed in response. The Sigma Pulse subordinates all definitions to an invariant reference signal, permitting measurement of a definition against something that is not itself a definition. The Office of Chronometric Standards maintains the narrower set of immutable definitions governing the Tower's fundamental temporal units, which may not be amended, only waited out.

Scholarly dispute

Whether a definition creates its object, or merely grants the Tower permission to catalogue an object that already exists, is the oldest unresolved question in the literature and the most often litigated.

The intervalist reading, favoured by the Custodial Spire, holds that the operative act is the seal and that the interval between drafting and sealing is a period of genuine non-existence. The merchant reading, argued at length in the Part I: Definitions of Litigation, holds that the Font could not produce a definition of nothing, and that existence therefore precedes inscription. A third position, advanced in the Twelfth Concordance Annex Delta and rejected in the Supplement to the Ninth Concordance, proposes that the question is malformed.

The Polvek Contradiction is generally regarded as decisive against at least one of these positions, though the parties disagree as to which. See also Inferential Decay and Glossarial Stream for the decay of definitions in transmission, and Adjacent Unrealities for the class of things that cannot be defined without changing what they are.

Notes

Definitions of persons are handled separately under the Lexicon of Peripheral Nomenclature and are not transferable between floors. A definition, once sealed, may be revised only by the Custodial Spire, may be contested only in writing, and may be destroyed only by the Annex Omega procedure, which has been invoked once. What was invoked it upon, and what is now undefined as a result, is recorded on a floor whose number remains under interim seal.