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The Modern Wording Audit

The reader’s Modern button replaces archaic English — thou, thee, hath, wherein — with plain wording. This page is the complete, public record of what that means: every rule, every changed passage, every exclusion, and the proofs that nothing else differs. The Modern text below is computed live in your browser by the same code the reader ships.

86exact dictionary rules
751word rewrites across the corpus
8,954strings proven meaning-identical
1,691verse passages checked
196passages touched by Modern
0changes to meaning

How it works

1A curated dictionary

Exact words and phrases only — no AI rewriting, no paraphrase. Each rule was checked against every place it fires in the text, and ambiguous words were excluded rather than risked.

2One atomic pass

Longest-match-first, whole words only, case preserved. Noun uses survive untouched: “the art of creation” keeps its art; “Khabbab bin Art” keeps his name.

3Proof on every build

The site refuses to publish unless every string passes meaning-equality, idempotency and residual checks, and this audit page matches the shipped dictionary exactly.

See it live

A real passage, picked at random from the changed set. The right-hand column is not stored anywhere — your browser is running the reader’s transform on the canonical text right now.

Every changed passage

All verse passages whose translation differs under Modern. Underlines mark the archaic words; highlights mark their replacements. Page numbers reference the Abdel Haleem translation (Oxford, 2005) for side-by-side comparison in your own copy.

What we deliberately left alone

The bar is meaning preserved, always — so any word whose modern replacement could shift sense even once stays exactly as Maududi’s translators wrote it. Classic remains the canonical text; Modern is a reading aid you can switch off.

The style arbiter

Wording choices follow the register of M. A. S. Abdel Haleem’s Oxford translation — widely regarded as the clearest modern English Quran. Across all 176,609 words of his translation, every archaic word we replace appears exactly zero times. His text is referenced, never copied: replacements keep Maududi’s own vocabulary, just in modern form.

Per-rule counts (corpus uses · occurrences in Haleem)

The meaning proofs

Mask-class equality

Every dictionary word is reduced to its equivalence class in both versions; the two streams must be byte-identical. Everything outside the approved rewrites — punctuation, numbers, names, footnote markers — is compared exactly.

Idempotency

Applying the transform twice must equal applying it once — proving no rule fires on another rule’s output and the text is stable.

Zero residue + golden traps

After the pass, no archaic key may remain anywhere; and a suite of trap sentences proves the things that must not change — rescue-verb “save”, noun “art”, “the Hereafter” — never do.

Dictionary fingerprint 35ec520deb75 · generated 2026-06-11 · every release is gated by the full validation suite (2,000+ automated checks) · the build fails if this page and the shipped dictionary ever disagree.