The Living Wilstach ◆ The Permissioned Stratum
Most terms pages constrain the person who signs. These run the other way: they are chiefly a list of things Medlara binds itself to in exchange for the privilege of filing your similes. Submitting is one sentence in an email — "I submit under the Submission Conditions" — and that sentence buys you everything below. One thing it also does, stated plainly rather than buried: it is permanent (clause 6). Read that clause first.
Version 1 · June 2026 · Changes are never retroactive
Copyright is untouched. You grant Medlara a non-exclusive, perpetual licence over the extracted entries only — never the work. You may publish, sell, license, or anthologise anywhere, at any time, with no duty to mention us. We will never ask for exclusivity, and nothing here prevents any other use of your own writing.
What enters the record, per simile: the simile itself, the sentence that carries it, at most one sentence either side as reader-requested context, your name as you direct, the work's title, and the year. That is the ceiling. The dictionary's public face shows the simile line; the fuller sentence appears only when a reader asks for it.
If you send the whole work, it exists with us only for extraction. Within thirty days of filing, the file and every working copy are deleted. What survives is the entries alone. We never retain, archive, or back up a submitted manuscript.
We will never sell, sublicense, syndicate, or transfer your text to anyone. We will never use it to train machine-learning models, nor permit anyone else to. Machine reading happens once, transiently, to find the similes — under commercial API terms that exclude training — and the conditions of clause 3 then apply.
Every entry carries your name in the form you choose — legal name, pen name, or (for translators) your name beside the original author's. An entry without attribution does not appear. If we cannot honour the form you asked for, the entry waits until we can.
A dictionary that can be unwritten is not a record. Once filed, an entry stands — in the dictionary, its later editions, and its exports — exactly as Wilstach's eight hundred stand. Submission is irrevocable, and we ask you to weigh that for a day before writing: the grant is forever precisely because it is so small (clause 2 is the whole of it).
Two things are always correctable: the attribution follows your instruction for the rest of the record's life (a changed name, an adopted pen name); and an entry that was never the submitter's to give (clause 10) is removed by us as a duty, not by you as a right.
The dictionary and the As…As… game corpus are different uses. Your entries reach the game — as material to play against, judge with, or display on boards — only if your letter opts in. Silence means the dictionary only. The opt-in, once given, is permanent on the same terms as clause 6 — decide it the same careful way.
Submission is free; we never charge a reading fee, and we never pay for entries. The dictionary is a record, not a marketplace — the same terms Wilstach gave Dickens. If the record is ever commercialised in a way that quotes you beyond clause 2, that requires a new agreement and your signature, not these conditions.
An entry is admitted if it is a genuine simile and not already in the record — nothing else. Declining an entry is not a judgement of the work, and we may decline entries without stating a reason. The editor's decision on the record is final — which is why clause 2 keeps what the record may hold so small, and clause 6 asks you to submit deliberately.
By submitting you confirm the work is yours, or that you control the relevant rights (publishers, estates, translators), and that you are over eighteen or submit through someone who is. This is the one clause that constrains you, and it is the one we cannot do without.
Entries live under the conditions in force on the day they were submitted; later versions apply only to later submissions. We will keep every version published. These pages are meant to be read, not litigated; if it ever comes to that, English law applies.
Questions before you write? The same desk answers them: wilstach@medlara.com. Ready instead? The submissions page explains the two routes in.