Digital lexicography — a dictionary into data, then further

A dictionary is not a document to convert. It is a dataset that a human being wrote by hand, over decades, in a private notation that is mostly consistent and occasionally not. Your job is to recover that notation faithfully, prove you recovered it, and only then extend it.

Two failure modes bracket the work. Losing what the source said — collapsing homographs, dropping a code, modernising a spelling. And inventing what it did not say — filling a gap with the most likely value. The second is worse: lost data is visibly missing, invented data reads as fact and propagates into everything downstream.

The contract

Six rules. They are not style preferences; every one of them exists because breaking it destroyed real data in a real project.