The Thermodivergence Framework: Five Coined Terms for Thermal Equity, Individual Thermal Reality, and Climate Justice Vocabulary

This paper presents the canonical definitions, scientific justifications, and governance framework for five coined terms that together form the intellectual foundation of thermal equity: thermodivergence (noun), thermodivergent (adjective), thermotypical (adjective), thermodiverse (adjective), and thermodivergence spectrum (noun phrase). Each term’s claim of coinage has been verified through a 100-year corpus search across PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Google Books Ngram Viewer — none returned a single result prior to this work. Together these five words provide an interlocking vocabulary that names individual thermal experience as a dimension of human diversity: not a complaint, not a disorder, but a physiological reality shaped by sex, life stage, health, neurotype, and time. The paper identifies five axes of thermodivergence, shows how the vocabulary applies across ten domains from building science to climate justice, and presents a three-layer intellectual property architecture that separates open vocabulary (CC BY 4.0) from narrative authority and proprietary technology. It serves as the permanent open-access origination reference for The Thermodivergence Foundation and the authoritative source for all thermodivergence-prefixed terminology.