The register rules: Plūtō

Evidence dossier 393 — Plūtō. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Plūtō
• Original script: PLVTO
• Pantheon: Roman
• Convention: Latin editorial convention, with Greek originals kept distinct from Roman reception
• False forms on record: 2
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 393 of 546

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is PLVTO, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Plūtō.

Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form pluto 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: pluto 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.

Exhibit 3 — struck from the record: Pluto. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ō→o, ū→u) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Plūtô. Origin: the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums. Grounds: a macron (length) is not a circumflex (quality/tone) — they answer different questions.

Exhibit 5 — the physical record. His monuments are pits and absences. In 1888 workmen on the Quirinal uncovered a subterranean altar-chamber identified with the Tarentum, the roofed pit where Rome sacrificed to Dis Pater and Proserpina — the closest archaeology comes to his door. The Severan copy of the Augustan acta (CIL VI 32323) preserves the 17 BCE liturgy in stone, including the nocturnal offerings to the 'inferis' on three successive nights. Before Rome, Etruria painted his face: the tombs of Tarquinia — the Tomb of the Augurs, the Tomb of the Leopards — banquet amid underworld watch-dogs and demons two centuries before the Secular Games, and funerary urns from Chiusi show Aita wrenching Phersipnai into his chariot. Rome's own grand Plūtō-temple is a negative space the texts acknowledge: the city preferred to worship the giver with Cerēs and to wall the taker into three dark days.

Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. The dwarf planet, discovered in 1930 and named at the suggestion of the eleven-year-old Venetia Burney, carries his name — and the irony is his: the richest name in the sky given to the smallest body, demoted in 2006 and beloved still. Walt Disney's Pluto debuted the same year, a dog answering to the god of the underworld; Glenn T.

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: Latin editorial convention, with Greek originals kept distinct from Roman reception. 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.

The Protocol's Position

Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.

The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.

The Verdict

Case closed on Plūtō: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form pluto rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /pluto/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Pluto first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.385–571 (the rape of Proserpina) and 10.1–85 (Orpheus), Virgil, Georgics 4.453–527 (Orpheus in the underworld), Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2.5.12 and Epitome 1.24 (Theseus, Pirithous, and the Chair of Forgetfulness).

The Register Continues

The register holds 546 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: Phoînix (read it) · next entry: Poliahu (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.