Stage 1: Glomeration

From Latin glomerāre (“to wind into a ball, to gather into a mass”), derived from glomus (“ball of yarn, sphere”). Etymologically, glomeration designates the act of winding disparate fibers into a compact, organized whole—the spinner's transformation of loose material into a coherent mass that may be stored, transported, and later unwound for use. This is not fabrication but consolidation: gathering scattered substance into accessible form.

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.” — John Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856)

Within the GNORIUM editorial pipeline, Glomeration constitutes the foundational stage wherein attestations—quotations evidencing lexical usage in situ—are systematically aggregated into a unified corpus. These attestations lie dispersed across digitized textual repositories: present in principle, yet functionally inaccessible without deliberate collection. Glomeration harvests these scattered witnesses to linguistic practice, consolidates them within a structured evidence base, and renders them available for subsequent analytical stages. Absent this preliminary gathering, the pipeline possesses no empirical foundation: no textual substrate from which lexicographic entries may be derived, no documentary evidence against which semantic and etymological claims may be validated.

Process

• Ingestion: Corpus documents are parsed and segmented into candidate passages.
• Extraction: Attestation boundaries are identified—the sentence or paragraph that constitutes a discrete attestation.
• Assessment: Each candidate receives a preliminary significance score based on potential lexicographic value.
• Selection: Passages meeting the threshold proceed to Nomination for enrichment.

Pathways

Attestations enter the editorial lifecycle through two complementary modalities of acquisition:

• Programmatic harvesting: Automated extraction systems traverse digitized corpora at scale identifying candidate passages across millions of textual artifacts through pattern-based segmentation and significance heuristics.
• Community contribution: Individual contributors—scholars, subject matter experts, and engaged readers—submit attestations discovered in situ during independent research, perpetuating the distributed volunteer model that historically underwrote comprehensive lexicographic enterprises.