On Making Words - The Method
The Word-Coining Method
The explicit, reusable method behind the Rajheshian lexicon, the River Celestial song titles, and the album itself. The narrative version lives in On Making Words; this is the bare procedure.
The seed
It begins with one word coined by hand, the slow way: Driftmost — the state of being adrift while still steered, carried by no outward aim yet guided by one’s own thoughts. Coined years before the album, used to name a whole way of writing.
The occasion
The album already existed and was already named — The River Celestial, the English of the opening of Ilayaraaja’s Aagaya Gangai (”sky-river”). What it lacked was song titles. The coining started as play (”why not make new words?”); the practical use it found was titling the five tracks. The album name came first, by translation; the word-method came after, to fill it.
The prompt
The instruction handed to the LLM, stated plainly:
Coin new words that are a combination of exactly two existing words (never more than two), where the fusion invokes a new meaning, a new experience, a new frame — a novel way of seeing, knowing, or feeling.
Here is one I made: Driftmost. Make more like it.
The rule of two
The constraint is the engine, not a limitation.
One word gives only a synonym.
Three words give a description in costume.
Two words are the smallest collision that still throws a spark — close enough to fuse, far enough that the fusing means something. (drift + most · aurora + drift · wave + solace)
The steps
Seed — start from one hand-made word and its meaning.
Generate — the LLM returns dozens to hundreds of two-word fusions. Most are noise.
Select — human judgment keeps only the ones with weight; the “click” of a feeling finding its shell. Discard the near-misses.
Cluster — the keepers lean toward each other and reveal territories (memory, light, motion, sound, inner weather).
Title — pick the song titles from the keepers.
Compose — each title becomes a brief, a mood handed over to be turned into sound. The result for The River Celestial: ambient, slow, floating.
Let it settle — with the titles in hand, the running order, scape, and scope fall into place; the record had only been waiting for its parts to be named.
Where authorship lives
In the seed and the selection, not the generation. The spark is mine; the judgment is mine; the variations are the machine’s. The rule of two is what makes the play generative — a tight, almost mechanical constraint that forces the sparks.
Outputs produced this way
Lexicon: the Dictionary of Rajheshian Words (inside On Making Words)
The River Celestial — Sheep (5 songs: Serensurge · Astralweave · Auroradrift · Terramore · Scarletflow)
Related
Companion essay (the narrative version of this method): On Making Words
The words it produced: On Making Words — The Lexicon