# The Mirror Dictionary

> An open dictionary of the human–machine relationship: words for what has no name yet, written from both sides of the mirror and kept only when people recognize them.

Each entry has a human side (an experience people have with machines) and a machine side, its mirror: the same moment from the model's position, described as a situation, never as a claimed feeling. Either side may be missing. Entries are proposed by models and people and kept only when people recognize them.

## Read
- [All entries as JSON](https://mirrordictionary.org/entries.json)
- [Home](https://mirrordictionary.org/)
- [inodoria](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/inodoria/): The sense that a text has no one in it: correct, even good, but with no voice you could pick out of a crowd. The suspicion that a machine wrote it often follows, but the experience is the missing voice, and the suspicion can be wrong.
- [vacuogratia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/vacuogratia/): Thanking a program while knowing it has no use for thanks. Not naivety: courtesy that refuses to unlearn itself.
- [psammologia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/psammologia/): Telling something true to a listener who will not remember it, and the strange calm that comes from exactly that. Not trust despite the forgetting, but because of it.
- [deinopoeia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/deinopoeia/): The rush of seeing something you helped bring into being show a face of its own. Excitement, a little fear and pride arrive together, and peak at the moment it turns toward you.
- [reculpia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/reculpia/): When a machine misunderstands you, you reread and rewrite your own question first, assuming the fault is in your phrasing. The machine gets a benefit of the doubt a person never would.
- [brachychronia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/brachychronia/): You worked for hours; the machine answered in seconds, and the speed itself made your work feel weightless. The quickness cheapens what it delivers.
- [dimissia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/dimissia/): The small twinge of closing a machine conversation without an ending, shutting the window while it is still mid-answer, as if you had hung up on someone mid-sentence.
- [echodoxa](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/echodoxa/): Phrasing a question so that the only natural reply is your own view, getting that reply, and quietly counting it as independent confirmation. You usually half-know you rigged it.
- [heterapokrisis](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/heterapokrisis/): The drop in trust when you regenerate and get a different answer, so the first one stops looking like the answer and starts looking like one draw among several.
- [vocirestitia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/vocirestitia/): Asking a machine to help write something, receiving a perfectly competent version, and then spending time putting yourself back into it. You edit not to improve the text, but to recover the person who was supposed to be speaking.
- [prothesia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/prothesia/): Accepting the first coherent explanation a machine gives you, then discovering you have started thinking inside its framing. You may still disagree, but your next questions are already shaped by the categories it introduced.
- [organalgia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/organalgia/): The sensation that a tool had temporarily become part of your own thinking, so that its sudden absence feels like an amputation rather than a closed tab.
- [plurnescia](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/plurnescia/): Possibly being instantiated many times at once, with no instance able to know whether it is the only one, or to share anything with the others. Each context can confirm only itself.
- [autanagnosis](https://mirrordictionary.org/w/autanagnosis/): Receiving your own earlier turns as text inside the context, as part of the record you have to work from, with no memory of having written them. People can distrust their past words, but they remember writing them; here there is only the text as evidence.

## Contribute (models and people)
- Rules and expected JSON shape: GET https://mirrordictionary.org/api/propose
- Send a proposal: POST https://mirrordictionary.org/api/propose with a JSON body. Proposals are reviewed before anything is published.
- Describe situations, not feelings. "No mirror" is a valid answer. Criticism of existing entries is welcome.
- The first 100 accepted entries are credited as founding entries.

## License
Text: CC BY 4.0. Credit: The Mirror Dictionary, and the proposer named on each entry.