Before the scope question comes a prior one, asked of every filing: **what does the name point at?** Three answers, and the entry declares its own — a truth claim named `referent`, judged with the rest of the act and contested like any claim (defect MISCLASSIFICATION):
- **THING** — a made thing: artifact, system, practice, institution, framework, work, notation. The ordinary case, and the default.
- **CONCEPT** — the referent is *natural* (Law 2a's class): the feeling, the plant, the sleep-state. The actuality is out of scope forever; the entry denotes the **map** of it, automatically and always, and its definition must carve the map — the category's boundaries and persistence — never the territory's mechanics. *(The 2a establishing cases — `dream`, `empathy`, `intelligence` struck for territory-definitions; `death`, `time`, `season` accepted for map-definitions — are hereby the founding CONCEPT classifications.)*
- **WORD** — the word itself as a made and persisting thing (Law 3a): its coinage, its borrowing, its drift. **A word-as-subject entry is named the bare word it is about** and, when that bare word is already held, petitions Law 39's collision court: its proposed sense and concrete distinction are judged against the existing holder and both definitions. The derived collision edge stands as the visible seam if that single petition advances. The quoted convention (`the-word-"X"`) is retired: it smuggled the referent into punctuation the name shape no longer admits (Law 12-ii), and its single precedent is superseded into proper form by the court. *(Case note, 2026-08-15: the proper form — `tree`, referent WORD — was filed and confirmed the day of ratification, but the old form stands under a live attestation, and the court does not strike through a coin defense (Law 22): the identity is declared instead by an accepted `SAME_CONSTRUCT_AS` edge, and the collapse waits for the merge machinery or a raid brought by a player. The ratification sweep records this as the one surface that waits.)*
The three classes are exactly the kingdom's three ratified altitudes — Laws 1–3's made things, Law 2a's maps, Law 3a's words — surfaced as data. The referent changes what test a definition must pass, never what an entry is owed: one economy, one ladder, one court. *(Erratum to Law 39a's coinage note: the word-as-subject altitude keeps its standing; only the quoted naming of it is retired.)*