The canonical register: Thémis
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Thémis, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Thémis to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as Θέμις, in the attestation LSJ and Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek give us. On the evidence, it means "A Titaness, the personification of divine order, law, and established custom; a consort of Zeus and mother of the Seasons (Horae) and the Fates (Moirai).". The canonical transliteration is Thémis.
And the marks themselves: e → é (Short epsilon). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and the whole discipline is the refusal of such lies.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'THAY-miss' — the first syllable rises in pitch like a gavel; both vowels are short and quick. 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 themis 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: themis 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.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Thé́mis: 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 e (where the Greek puts it) to É — a different word with a different rhythm; the sources stress e and nothing else As for Thêmis: 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 e As for temis: 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. Rome made no translation of Thémis — her name crossed into Latin unchanged, a rarity among the Titans, which tells us how abstractly the Romans took her: not a foreign goddess to be matched but a concept to be quoted. Cicero treats her as personified divine law, and late antique, medieval, and Renaissance art gradually fused her with Justitia, the Roman Justice whose scales and sword became the standard attributes of Lady Justice from the sixteenth century onward.
And it never stopped working. Every courthouse statue of a robed woman with scales descends from Thémis — filtered through Justitia and the Renaissance, but unmistakably the Titaness who made order divine. Her name passed directly into modern institutions: asteroid 24 Themis (1853), NASA's THEMIS mission (2007), and countless law reviews and legal institutes.
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
Thémis is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form themis 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 Thémis stands at /themis/.
The docket for this ruling: 3 false forms ruled against, Thé́mis first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: e → é; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 8 cited sources — LSJ, Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Hesiod, Theogony 132–136, 901–906.
The Register Continues
This is one of 548 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: Theía (read it) · next entry: Thēseus (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.