The register rules: Ọrun
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Ọrun, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Ọrun to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Ọrun — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: aw-ROON — open o (dot-below), low-high melody. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form orun 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: orun may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. The Ọrun-ayé structure traveled with the diaspora: Candomblé's Oxalá-realm, Santería's heaven of Olófin, and Haiti's lwa-cosmology all keep the two-world map. Christian heaven merged with Ọrun in the New World without ever absorbing it: the Yoruba sky remains a realm of traffic and traffic-officers (the orisha), not of distant thrones — heaven as the next city over, not the next world.
And it never stopped working. The word lives in a thousand names: Ọrunmila (heaven-knows-salvation), Ọlọrun (owner-of-heaven), Ọrúnmìlà, Ọba-Ọrun. Ifá divination — UNESCO-listed — is its daily news service, and the Egúngún festivals keep the ancestors' visits on the calendar.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: modern Yoruba orthography — underdotted vowels and ṣ preserved. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Ọrun is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form orun is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Ọrun stands at /sites/orun/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Idowu, Bascom, R.C. Abraham, Dictionary of Modern Yoruba.
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Orpheús (read it) · next entry: Ọrúnmìlà (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.