Stage 2: Nomination

From Latin nōmināre (“to name, to call by name, to designate”), derived from nōmen (“name”). In Roman legal and political discourse, nōminātiō denoted the formal act of naming a candidate for office—the deliberate identification and designation of a particular individual from among many. Classical grammarians employed nōmina to designate substantives: the names of things, distinguished categorically from verbs (actions), adjectives (qualities), and other grammatical elements. Etymologically, nomination signifies the act of singling out, of conferring identificatory specificity through naming.

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.“ — Chinese proverb, cited in E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (1937)

Within the GNORIUM editorial lifecycle, Nomination fulfills an essential preparatory function: each attestation undergoes systematic lexical decomposition, whereby constituent terms are identified and matched to their corresponding lexical entries and semantic senses. Prior to computational analysis, every substantive lexeme is resolved—its documented definitions, etymological derivations, and attested usage patterns retrieved from aggregated lexicographic reference sources. This preliminary identification ensures that subsequent analytical stages operate not tabula rasa but rather informed by the cumulative documentary entry of prior philological scholarship.

Process

• Segmentation: The attestation text is parsed into constituent lexical units—every word that might bear meaning.
• Identification: Each term is matched against existing dictionary entries, retrieving known definitions, senses, and etymological data.
• Designation: Candidate senses are nominated—which meaning of 'bank' or 'set' does this context invoke?
• Assembly: Retrieved information is compiled into an annotated dossier that accompanies the attestation through subsequent stages.

Rationale

Consider the methodological distinction between approaching a text without preparation versus consulting established commentary prior to interpretation. The contextually equipped reader discerns semantic and stylistic nuances that remain invisible to the unprepared observer. Nomination furnishes this preparatory apparatus: rather than engaging attestations ex nihilo, the analytical infrastructure operates with preloaded lexicographic knowledge. This context-augmented methodology yields demonstrable improvements in sense discrimination accuracy, grammatical classification precision, and the identification of figurative, technical, or register-specific usage patterns.