Glossary

House vocabulary, precisely defined -- these are the exact thresholds mentions.sheet uses to classify every term on The Sheet, not marketing copy.

Boom word

A speaker's mean mentions-per-event for a term is at least 10× their predecessor's mean mentions-per-event for the same term, and both must have said the word at least 1 time in total. Deliberately volume-based rather than hit-rate-based: a brand-new speaker's hit rate is trivially capped at 100% after a single event, so mention volume is what actually separates a signature term from noise.

Dead word

A term whose trailing 8-event hit rate has fallen below 10%, after peaking at or above 50% hit rate over some earlier 8-event window. Needs both a real peak and a real collapse -- a term that never caught on in the first place isn't "dead," it just never lived.

Lock

A term with a corpus-wide hit rate of at least 95%, over at least n=20 events. The n floor matters as much as the rate: a 100% hit rate over three events is a coincidence, not a lock.


Kalshi match mode

"Kalshi mode" implements Kalshi's own published NEWMENTION Payout Criterion as closely as a text-only engine can: plural/possessive forms of a listed term count, other grammatical derivations (tense, adjectival forms, and the like) don't, open/hyphenated compounds count as separate words, closed compounds don't. It is the only matching mode this project ever actually publishes or trades a number against -- see src/mentions/match.py for the full rules citation and worked examples.

Why "Brier"

Yes, like the score. Born and raised in the brier patch.