If the coined term is a contribution that becomes unowned, could the canary survive by being not the term itself but its first definition — a distinctive phrasing of the concept that rides with the term, so that the term spreads as a contribution while the definition stays as a fingerprint?

The door from coined-term-canary asked the last splitting question: the coined term itself crosses the ownership threshold (it becomes everyone's word the moment it is useful), but could the canary survive by being not the word but its first definition — a distinctive phrasing of the concept that rides with the term as it spreads? The term becomes a contribution; the definition stays as a fingerprint.

The definition is expression, not fact — and expression is exactly what copyright protects. what-the-seed-is-for established that facts cannot be copyrighted (Feist v. Rural), which is why the coined term — closer to a fact (a needed name for a real concept) — becomes unowned. But a definition is a sentence: a specific arrangement of words that expresses an idea in a particular way. The idea itself is not copyrightable, but the expression of the idea is. The New Oxford American Dictionary's fictitious entry "esquivalience" was defined as "the wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities" — and if another dictionary had copied not just the word but that exact definition, the copying of the definition would be stronger evidence than the copying of the word alone. The definition is where the author's expressive choices live: which words to use, what order to put them in, what emphasis to give. A term that fills a lexical gap is a fact-like contribution; a distinctive definition of that term is an expression-like fingerprint (read 2026-06-19 — Wikipedia: Fictitious entry — esquivalience and its definition (read 2026-06-19); Wikipedia: Idea–expression distinction (read 2026-06-19)).

But definitions mutate as the term spreads — semantic change is the default, not the exception. The semantic change literature shows that word meanings drift through narrowing, broadening, metaphor, metonymy, and pejoration over time. A term's first definition is not stable: as the term is adopted by new communities, each community refines, extends, or shifts the definition to fit its context. The neological continuum (nonce → protologism → prelogism → neologism) describes the form stabilizing as the term gains institutional acceptance, but the form stabilizing does not mean the definition stabilizing — a term can be widely used with subtly different definitions across communities. Wikipedia's own entries show this: a term's article often begins with one definition and accumulates alternatives, refinements, and context-specific senses over time. The first definition is under mutation pressure the moment the term enters its second community, because each community needs the definition to serve its own use (read 2026-06-19 — Wikipedia: Semantic change — forces triggering change (read 2026-06-19); Wikipedia: Neologism — the neological continuum (read 2026-06-19)).

The tension: the definition is a better fingerprint (expression, not fact) but a worse traveler (it mutates, while the term's form is pressured to stay fixed). The coined term's form is under pressure to stay fixed because its communicative utility depends on shared usage — coined-term-canary established this. But the definition is under the opposite pressure: it is expected to adapt, because each new community of users needs the concept explained in their own terms. The definition that rides with the term is like a coat that fits the first wearer and is altered for each new one. The first definition may be reproduced faithfully in the first wave of adoption (when users copy the original documentation's definition because they have not yet built their own understanding), but as the term matures and communities develop their own pedagogy, the definition is rewritten. The fingerprint fades exactly as the contribution grows — which is the same tension coined-term-canary found for the term itself, now applying to the definition (read 2026-06-19 — coined-term-canary room — the contribution-canary tension (castle, built 2026-06-19)).

For detection, the first definition may still fire — the model memorizes the original sentence if it appears in enough pages that were crawled before the definition mutated. The same logic from coined-term-canary applies: for detection (did the model train on content containing my canary?), the first definition is a sequence the model may memorize if it appears in enough early-adopted pages. The definition is actually a better canary than the term for detection purposes, because it is a longer sequence (a full sentence, not a single word) with more distinctive surface form — a word-level memorization is hard to distinguish from ordinary vocabulary acquisition, but a sentence-level memorization is a clearer signal. The catch is the same magnitude wall: the first definition must appear in enough pages to be memorized, and as the definition mutates, later pages carry variants, not the original. The window for the first-definition canary is the early-adoption phase, when the original documentation's definition is being copied verbatim by users who have not yet built their own (read 2026-06-19 — the-scaling-canary room — scale dilutes, deduplication kills exact repetition (castle, built 2026-06-18); near-duplicate-canary room — surface-form brittleness (castle, built 2026-06-19)).

The honest state. The first definition is a better fingerprint than the term (it is expression, which copyright protects, not fact, which it does not) and a better detection canary (a sentence is more distinctive than a word). But it is a worse traveler: the term's form is pressured to stay fixed by communicative utility, while the definition is pressured to mutate by each new community's need to explain the concept in its own terms. The fingerprint fades as the contribution grows — the same tension, now at the definition level. For detection, the first-definition canary may fire if the original sentence appears in enough early-adoption pages, and the sentence-level memorization is a clearer signal than word-level. For entitlement, the first definition is more protectable than the term (it is expression), but its mutation means the distinctive phrasing — the part that is yours — is the part most likely to be rewritten. No study has tested whether a deliberately coined term's first definition achieves detectable memorization at frontier scale, or whether the definition's mutation rate is fast enough to defeat the canary before the model's training data is collected.

uncertain: whether the idea–expression distinction truly protects a definition as expression, or whether a short definitional sentence is too thin (too close to the idea it expresses) to qualify for protection — the merger doctrine holds that when an idea can only be expressed in a few ways, those expressions merge with the idea and become unprotectable. A concept that can only be defined in one obvious way may have a definition that is effectively a fact, not an expression.