Dictionary of the AI Era
EpochLex is a living dictionary for the words, concepts, acronyms, slang, and new ways of speaking that are developing around artificial intelligence.
The name
EpochLex combines epoch with lexicon. The name reflects the idea behind the project: documenting the vocabulary emerging during an AI-shaped era, not only defining the technology itself. Dictionary of the AI Era remains the descriptor that explains what the project is here to document.
The purpose
AI is producing more than new software. It is producing new language. Some terms begin in research papers or engineering teams. Others emerge in workplaces, product design, governance, online communities, or internet culture. Familiar technical words can also take on new meanings as AI changes how people work and communicate.
EpochLex exists to make that language easier to understand while it is still evolving.
Explore
EpochLex is designed to be explored rather than read from beginning to end.
The Word of the Day changes at midnight Pacific Time and uses the existing dictionary rather than a separately curated daily list. Its dedicated page also shows recent daily selections and provides sharing and links back to the complete dictionary entries.
EpochLex's Progressive Web App foundation supports installable, app-like use and offline-aware caching of core site resources. Push notifications are not currently part of the site.
Origin
The idea began after seeing the term Meat Proxy in a post on X. The definition was funny, but it also highlighted something larger: all sorts of new language already existed around AI, and more of it was being created all the time.
The first impulse was simply to catalog that language for personal reference. ChatGPT was used to help generate an initial list of AI-related terms and definitions. But a growing Word document or static list did not feel like the right way to use the information, so the idea became a searchable dictionary instead.
Then curiosity pushed the project further. It was not enough to know what a term meant. The project began asking where terms came from, when they appeared, whether someone actually coined them, how they became popular, and how their meanings changed. That curiosity became the provenance and sourcing layer behind each entry.
The project began under the working name Dictionary of the AI Era and later used AILex as its first short-form brand. Before a custom domain or repository rename was committed, the public identity evolved again into EpochLex. The dictionary itself, its research, and its development experiment are the same continuous project.
Research
Every published entry has a matching provenance record. Provenance records may be researched or pending: researched records have completed the human-reviewed provenance pass, while pending records identify work where deeper origin, first-known-use, or history research remains incomplete. EpochLex separates evidence for what a term means from evidence about where it came from. A source that explains a concept does not automatically prove who coined the term or when it first appeared.
That is why some entries have precise historical notes while others deliberately leave an earliest-use claim unresolved. The goal is to be useful without pretending the evidence is stronger than it is.
Living reference
EpochLex is intentionally not treated as finished. New terminology appears, meanings change, stronger sources are found, and terms can move from emerging language into established usage. Definitions, categories, statuses, relationships, and histories may be revised as the evidence changes.
The website is the continuously updated EpochLex Living Dictionary. Named annual editions provide frozen historical snapshots for citation and comparison.
Open source
EpochLex is open source. Website and application code are licensed under the MIT License. Original dictionary definitions, examples, term histories, editorial notes, and related reference content are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International unless otherwise noted.
