The register rules: Psychḗ
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Psychḗ, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Psychḗ to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Ψυχή, in the attestation Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) 4.28–6.24 — the tale of Cupid and Psyche and Homer, Odyssey 11.488–491; Iliad 22.362–363 — the psyche as shade and life-breath give us. On the evidence, it means "Soul, breath". The canonical transliteration is Psychḗ.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'PSYCHE' — pronounce the restored form with attention to the preserved diacritics and length. 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 psyche 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: psyche 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. Later Platonism turned the romance into doctrine: for Plotinus and his successors Psyche's fall and ascent mirrored the soul's own, and Apuleius's tale — probably itself steeped in Mystery-lore — was read as an initiation text. Early Christian writers kept the image of the soul as bride but transferred the bridegroom to Christ; Origen's allegorical reading of the Song of Songs breathes the same air.
And it never stopped working. Psychḗ is one of the great donors to the world's vocabulary: psyche, psychic, psychology, psychiatry, psychedelic, psychosomatic — all borrow her name for the mind's phenomena. In art she had a second life unmatched by any Greek heroine: Roman frescoes, engraved gems, and sarcophagi of the butterfly-winged girl; Raphael's Farnesina loggia; Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss (1787–1793); Keats's 'Ode to Psyche' (1819), the first of his great odes, which apologizes for arriving late at her worship — she had, he said, no temple, choir, or oracle, so he would build them in verse.
The Convention's Own History
The marks this register defends were not invented for typesetting. Ancient Greek carried a melodic pitch accent, and the acute and circumflex were added by Alexandrian scholars — Aristophanes of Byzantium, tradition holds — precisely to preserve it when the spoken language began to level. Vowel quantity (the macron's concern) is older still: it changes meter, meaning, and grammar, and the poets of the Theogony depend on it. To drop either class of mark is to drop two millennia of deliberate preservation. The restored-stress convention simply continues the oldest documented project in European scholarship: keeping the sound of Greek alive in its letters.
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
Psychḗ is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form psyche 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 Psychḗ stands at /psyche/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) 4.28–6.24 — the tale of Cupid and Psyche, Homer, Odyssey 11.488–491; Iliad 22.362–363 — the psyche as shade and life-breath, Plato, Phaedrus 246a–254e; Aristotle, De Anima — the soul as charioteer and as form of the living body.
The Register Continues
Entry 402 of 548 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.
Continue the register — previous entry: Pryderi (read it) · next entry: Ptḥ (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.