Pýthōn — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Pýthōn, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Pýthōn to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Πύθων, as Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Hesiod, Theogony record. On the evidence, it means "To rot, decay". The canonical transliteration is Pýthōn.
And the marks themselves: y → ý (Acute on upsilon); o → ō (Macron: long omega). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and small lies in references have long consequences.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'PYOO-thohn' — round the lips for 'pyoo', then aspirate the 'th' as in 'top-hon', and hold the final vowel long. 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 python 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: python may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — y → ý, o → ō — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Pýthṓn: it comes from the English ear — English speakers slam the first syllable of every borrowed name (DEL-fi, MY-cene), so the accent drifts forward online, and it fails because moves the stress from y (where the Greek puts it) to Ō — a different word with a different rhythm; the sources stress y and nothing else As for Pýthon: it comes from the half-restoration — well-meaning posts that keep the accent because it looks Greek and drop the macron because it looks optional, and it fails because drops the vowel length on o → ō: the quantity is as attested as the accent (Macron: long omega), and without it the meter of the name collapses As for Pýthōn: it comes from the circumflex habit — writers who learned that "the little hat means Greek" and apply it wherever an acute belongs, and it fails because 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 y As for pyton: it comes from the anglicized respelling — the name written the way English guesses it sounds, and it fails because rewrites the consonants of the attested form to fit English spelling habits; every cluster simplified this way erases a letter the sources write
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Pýthōn belongs to a widespread Indo-European and Near Eastern motif: the young storm or sun god who defeats a primordial dragon to establish cosmic order. The Greek version preserves a specifically Delphic local myth, but echoes of Tiamat, Vṛtra, and the biblical Leviathan are unmistakable.
And it never stopped working. Pýthōn lives on in the Pythian Games, the Pythagorean fascination with Delphi, and the very word 'python'—borrowed, somewhat absurdly, for a programming language whose logo is two snakes. More seriously, the myth remains a foundational text for understanding how Apollo's rational prophecy superseded older, chthonic forms of divination.
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
Pýthōn is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form python 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 Pýthōn stands at /sites/python/.
The docket for this ruling: 4 false forms ruled against, Pýthṓn first on the docket; 2 preserved marks verified: y → ý, o → ō; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Hesiod, Theogony, Pindar, Pythian Odes.
The Register Continues
Entry 216 of 287 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: Pŷr (read it) · next entry: Quetzalcōātl (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.