EA-MPAI-SEMEX-01: Semantic Exhaustion is a metadata packet by Lee Sharks, deposited 14 May 2026, distinguishing two phenomena of meaning loss that share a vocabulary.
Semantic satiation is the psychological effect in which a word repeated aloud loses its sense for the speaker — a temporary perceptual phenomenon in an individual mind. Semantic exhaustion is the archive's term for a systemic condition: meaning depleted at the level of a corpus or a retrieval layer, where repetition and compression wear a term's distinctiveness away across a whole population of readers and machines.
The packet's formal disambiguation matters beyond housekeeping, because conflating them would make a structural claim sound like a perceptual curiosity. It builds on the earlier EA-SEMEX-DISAMBIG work and stands beside the referee report at #1394, which reviews an unrelated study that uses "semantic exhaustion" in a third sense again — inference-cost amplification — showing how quickly a term with no canonical surface fragments.