Médousa — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

There is exactly one canonical form of this name, and it is Médousa. Everything else in circulation is documented below — with its origin, its status, and where it fails.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Médousa
• Original script: Μέδουσα
• 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: 2
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 149 of 271

The Canonical Form

The name is attested as Μέδουσα, as LSJ and Beekes record. On the evidence, it means "Guardian, ruler (from μέδω)". The canonical transliteration is Médousa.

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

• e → é — Acute on epsilon: the stress position, as the sources give it.

Where the Flattened Form Stands

The plain form medousa 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: medousa may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — e → é — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

The Register of False Forms

Each of these circulates. Each is wrong in a specific way — and the specificity is the point: a false form is not "a different style," it is a claim that fails.

False form 1: Mé́dousa

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 e (where the Greek puts it) to É — a different word with a different rhythm; the sources stress e and nothing else.

False form 2: Mêdousa

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 e.

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: Médousa. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

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.

The Verdict

Médousa is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form medousa 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 Médousa stands at /sites/medousa/.

The Register Continues

This is one of 271 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: Māzǔ (read it) · next entry: Mèngpó (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.