The sweeps were brutal: the thread field, the trust field, EC's own priority five — nearly all of it closed on live collisions. What's below is everything that made it through, sorted by how hard it has been checked: three names verified clean more than once, two carrying real-but-navigable neighbours, and four newly opened by the starter field on 08-04, still only one pass deep. Each shows why it holds, what it still carries, and the gate it has to pass next. The dead are at the fence; the whole sky is on the map.
The composer's instruction written between movements: proceed without pause. Exactly a session handoff — the music continues, the seam is intentional, nobody stops playing. Short, pronounceable, slightly exotic; obtuse on the surface, load-bearing underneath, which is precisely the arbitrary-with-a-buried-story lane the obtuse-lane guidance recommends.
The self-finished edge that keeps the whole cloth from unraveling — continuity as an edge property. The entire loom and drawn-line family closed around it (Weft, Shuttle, Needle, Weave, Strand), and Selvedge is the one thread the sweep left intact. Denim-culture warmth gives it a quiet in with the audience that already fetishizes selvedge denim.
The original shortlist #1, from the very first pass: the track-and-field term for the baton exchange itself — the closest literal descendant of the metaphor the whole product is built on. It has quietly outlasted every flashier candidate. Its open question was never clearance; it's register — the word reads industrial under the warmth lens.
The calm operator of the reliable crossing — carries something across a gap, on a schedule, and everyone trusts the timetable. The sole survivor of EC's priority five, and the warmth thesis's strongest case: communal, everyday, gentle, a joy to say. "Just ferry it to me" passes the phonaesthetics test better than anything else left.
The most literal name in the whole field: not a metaphor for the handoff, the imperative is the handoff. "Relay it forward" collapses into one word. Zero abstraction — which is both the appeal (nothing to teach) and the risk (nothing ownable but the verb itself). The only candidate filed in Cluster B, the evolve-don't-leave lane.
EC's sugar-and-flour proposal split the way the fire field did: the ingredients are consumed, but the preferment is never used up — a portion held back, fed, and carried into the next bake so nothing ever starts from nothing. Against "AI sessions start blank," that is the same sentence twice. After a fortnight in which almost everything closed, three preferment words came back with nothing in tech at all — craft vocabulary software hasn't colonised yet. And the structure is favourable, not merely empty: generic inside baking means nobody owns them there, while against context infrastructure they read as arbitrary marks — the strongest registrable tier.
Logged back in v0.6 with the note that the metaphor is exactly the product — and shelved in the same breath as "almost certainly too whimsical." EC's baking proposal converged on it independently, which is reason enough to unshelve it: the dismissal was a taste call made before the warmth thesis existed, and the warmth thesis argues approachability is the feature, not the liability.
Three lanes survive independently of which wordmark wins — they don't compete with the five, they compound with them.
Threadline (open, Cluster C) and Symbolon (story intact; company-name neighbors don't touch a feature) are stronger as product-surface names — the trust receipt, the session thread — than as company marks. Smaller surface, smaller collision exposure.
Invented words — the Kodak/Sonos craft. Deliberately left for the creative director: an empty vessel costs meaning-building spend, and judging coinage requires taste this exercise doesn't pretend to have.
Compounds of the surviving pieces (the loom words, the score words, Relay's own vocabulary). Cheap to generate, hard to judge — also CD territory, now with a much better-scouted field to draw from.
Opened 07-31 by EC's Opal proposal. Opal, Ember, and Hearth all closed on live AI products; the field's value is narrative (a banked fire is a session handoff). One unverified outlier: Girasol, an opal variety.