The register rules: Cheírōn

The internet spells Cheírōn more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Cheírōn
• Original script: Χείρων
• Pantheon: Greek
• Convention: the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write
• False forms on record: 3
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 108 of 546

The Canonical Form

The name is attested as Χείρων. On the evidence, it means "Hand". The canonical transliteration is Cheírōn.

Every mark is evidence, and every piece of evidence is checkable:

• r → í — Acute iota — tonos on εί (Χείρων): the stress position, as the sources give it.
• n → ōn — Long omega + nu: the vowel length, as the sources give it.

Where the Flattened Form Stands

The plain form chiron is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.

What the fallback status forbids is promotion: chiron may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — r → í, n → ōn — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

The Register of False Forms

False form 1: Ché́írōn

Origin: the English ear — English speakers slam the first syllable of every borrowed name (DEL-fi, MY-cene), so the accent drifts forward online.

Violation: moves the stress from r (where the Greek puts it) to E — a different word with a different rhythm; the sources stress r and nothing else.

False form 2: Cheíron

Origin: the half-restoration — well-meaning posts that keep the accent because it looks Greek and drop the macron because it looks optional.

Violation: drops the vowel length on n → ōn: the quantity is as attested as the accent (Long omega + nu), and without it the meter of the name collapses.

False form 3: Cheîrōn

Origin: the circumflex habit — writers who learned that "the little hat means Greek" and apply it wherever an acute belongs.

Violation: the source carries an acute (oxeia, a rising tone), not a circumflex (perispomene, a rise-fall): the two marks are different facts about pitch, and only the acute is attested on r.

The Contested Forms

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — the restored-stress convention: acute and circumflex for pitch, macrons for vowel quantity, exactly as the sources write — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Cheírōn. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

Why These Marks Exist at All

Greek diacritics are a preservation technology. The acute marks pitch rising; the circumflex marks pitch rising and falling; the macron marks time — how long the vowel is held. The first two were invented by Hellenistic scholars to save the accent as speech flattened; the last matters because Greek meter is built from long and short syllables the way music is built from beats. A transliteration that keeps these is not "decorated" — it is the difference between the name as evidence and the name as guesswork. This register holds to the restored-stress convention because it is the convention that keeps the evidence.

What the Address Bar Allows

IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.

That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.

Where the Name Stood First

No great temple of Cheírōn is known; he is a daimonic tutor, not an Olympian with a state cult, though a cave above Portaria on Mount Pelion is traditionally identified as the Cheironeion, his school. His real monument is the art: Attic black- and red-figure vases repeatedly show Peleus handing the infant Achilles into the centaur's arms, and Roman sarcophagi of the 2nd–3rd c. CE show him teaching the lyre — the 'education of Achilles' among the most copied sarcophagus compositions of the empire. The sculpted centauromachies — the Olympia west pediment and the Parthenon south metopes — preserve the wild centaur type against which his justice was defined. The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.

The Verdict

The register rules for Cheírōn, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. chiron is the sanctioned fallback for systems without marks — a vehicle, never the scholarly primary. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /chiron/ enforces it.

The docket for this ruling: 3 false forms ruled against, Ché́írōn first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: r → í, n → ōn; no contested forms attested.

The Register Continues

This is one of 546 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.

Continue the register — previous entry: Chímaira (read it) · next entry: Cihuacōātl (read it).

The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.