Kiswahili

An expanding, non-material geographical phenomenon that erodes matter, information, memory, and physical laws, leaving inhabited landmasses separated by vast zones of unreality.

A continent of matter surrounded on every side by the pale, with its own geography, climates, peoples, languages, and cultures.

Belonging or relating to a single isola; the adjective derived from isola.

Taking place between isolas, especially travel, communication, trade, clothing, or institutions that cross the pale.

The oceanic isola in which Disco Elysium takes place, dominated by a vast sea and a scattered archipelago of inhabited islands.

Belonging to or originating in Insulinde, its archipelago, history, peoples, or wildlife.

The largest and most politically dominant isola, containing many of the world's oldest states and much of its established international order.

The western cultural and geopolitical sphere of Mundi; Occidental describes its nations, peoples, institutions, or customs.

The highest category of historical individual in Elysium: a supposedly sacred embodiment of the World Spirit who compresses centuries of change into decades.

The political-religious system that recognises and grants exceptional historical authority to figures known as Innocences.

The Innocence of humanism, internationalism, and interisolary travel, credited with shaping modern institutions and the discovery of Insulinde.

Relating to Dolores Dei, the era named after her, or the institutions, art, architecture, and beliefs associated with her rule.

A northeastern isola and the name of its largest nation, strongly associated with revolution, science, and the origins of communism.

The coldest known isola, dominated by tundra and taiga and serving as the main setting of Sacred and Terrible Air.

An eastern isola containing the People's Republic of Samara and other territories shaped by communist rule and conflict.

A western isola and panisolary state, the ancestral homeland of Kim Kitsuragi's family.

An isola of deserts, plateaus, ancient civilisations, and diverse peoples, culturally analogous in the setting to parts of Africa and the Middle East.

A city-state in Insulinde, formerly an imperial capital and revolutionary commune, now divided and governed under foreign occupation.

An alliance of powerful nations that defeated the Revacholian revolution and continues to occupy and govern the city.

The present administrative designation for occupied Revachol as a territory controlled by the Coalition rather than a sovereign state.

Revachol under its former royal and imperial order, when the city was the centre of a suzerain state and colonial power.

A political relationship in which a dominant state controls a subordinate territory; in Revachol it also names the old royal order and a strategy board game.

The largest landmass of Insulinde, also called the Little Continent, on which Revachol is located.

A neglected coastal district of Revachol where the murder investigation and most events of Disco Elysium take place.

A large working-class quarter of Revachol West containing Martinaise and the precinct where Harry normally serves.

Revachol's central and wealthiest urban district, built around the river delta and associated with government, finance, and high culture.

Revachol's underfunded civilian police force, formed under Coalition rule; Harry and Kim serve in separate RCM precincts.

A centrist ideology of stability, gradualism, international institutions, and controlled change; a Moralist is one of its adherents.

A transnational moralist organisation that maintains the post-revolutionary international order and oversees institutions including the Coalition and ICP.

The communist revolutionary government established after the monarchy fell and destroyed by the Coalition invasion.

The worldwide revolutionary upheaval that began before the current century, created communist states, and culminated in the failed revolution in Revachol.

A lorry driver whose repeated travel through the pale has left her half-lost in memories that may belong to her or to other people.

A cut-content name for a person who enters or works within the pale, an activity described as dangerous to sanity.

Ruby's radio-based device for imposing dimensions on the pale, compressing the distance across it and producing powerful interference.

An imprecise name used by Angus for Ruby's pale latitude compressor because he understands it only as a device that emits unusual radio waves.

The modern scientific study of the pale, its effects, and the technologies used to measure or traverse it.

Relating to the pale, its scientific study, or the informational and physical disturbances it produces.

Voices, memories, or other information leaking through the pale into long-distance telephone and radio transmissions.

A playful coinage for someone who ventures into the pale or into an entroponetic unknown, formed on the model of astronaut.

A gigantic, long-sought stick-insect cryptid native to Insulinde whose encounter with Harry becomes one of the game's central revelations.

The archipelago encountered by the expedition that discovered Insulinde, described at the time as empty of human settlement.

A Dolorian-era emblem of Insulinde made from white specks, representing the isola's previously uninhabited archipelago.

A strict, poetry-like psychological discipline that lets travellers preserve identity and sanity while crossing the pale.

A Thought Cabinet memory of the Volta do Mar mantra used on the expedition that discovered Insulinde, contrasting wonder at a new world with unsettling mechanical imagery.

A roughly three-metre pillar of silence inside the Dolorian church, understood as a tiny intrusion of the pale that absorbs sound and data.

The minute point at the centre of the church anomaly that Soona identifies as a hole in reality and a possible seed of expanding pale.

Pius of Perikarnassis, the first recorded Innocence and the figure associated with the ancient origin of the innocentic system.

An educational book about the Innocences, history, religion, and the exercise of innocentic power.

The cultural, religious, and political tradition centred on Dolores Dei and the historical order identified with her.

A humanist doctrine associated with Dolores Dei that underpins moralism, parliamentary democracy, welfare institutions, and internationalism.

Relating to the historical Franconigerian centuries and their aristocratic, military, and frontier cultural imagery.

The occupation administration through which Coalition officials and institutions exercise political authority over Revachol.

Relating to Kras Mazov and the Elysian communist tradition developed from his economic and revolutionary theories.

A Thought Cabinet interpretation of communism that gives Harry a sharper model of capitalism while mocking his failure to build any actual communism.

Kras Mazov's supposedly systematic doctrine of class struggle, revolution, and communist social organisation.

A fringe communist theory that sufficiently intense collective revolutionary belief can produce measurable effects in matter.

The hypothetical material force generated by committed communist belief, invoked to explain structures that should be physically impossible.

A communist revolutionary or supporter of a revolutionary commune, especially a member or defender of the Commune of Revachol.

Elysium's radical pro-market ideology of wealth, entrepreneurship, deregulation, and personal financial success.

A euphemistic label for Revacholian nationalist and fascist politics focused on restoring a mythologised past and ethnic hierarchy.

A Thought Cabinet expression of fascist Revacholian nationalism that imagines a restored, exclusionary state while exposing Harry's resentment and addiction.

An alternative descriptive name for the Antecentennial Revolution, emphasising its position around the transition between centuries.

The Insulindian theatre of the revolution: years of fighting between the Commune of Revachol and the royalist and Coalition forces.

The short-lived revolutionary government associated with Kras Mazov, named for the eleven days it held power before being defeated.

The powerful dockworkers' organisation controlling Revachol's harbour, led by Evrart Claire and central to the ongoing strike.

A major logistics and shipping conglomerate in conflict with the dockworkers' union over the Martinaise harbour strike.

The Débardeurs' Union as an organisation identified with its leader Evrart Claire and his political control of the harbour.

An Oranjese private military company whose armoured mercenaries are hired by Wild Pines during the strike.

The Moralintern's international police organisation, responsible for cross-border cooperation and policing outside the RCM's jurisdiction.

The central committee at the hub of the Coalition's administrative structure, from which its agencies and lines of responsibility extend.

Moralist bureaucratic language for price stability, embodied by an institute whose officials help administer the Coalition's economic order.

A culturally diverse avenue and entertainment district in Jamrock known for nightlife, music, trade, and crime.

A prosperous Revachol district associated with wealth, fashionable residences, and the city's upper classes.

A vast banlieue south of Jamrock and one of the major urban expanses surrounding central Revachol.

An industrial district of Revachol associated with coal, mausoleums, and rumours of another Feld playback-machine prototype.

A poor Jamrock neighbourhood whose name and history evoke disease, overcrowding, and urban deprivation.

A democratic Mundi nation, major Occidental power, Coalition member, and homeland of several characters and companies.

A cultural and political region of Mundi associated with Dolores Dei, Suresne, and the Dolorian historical order.

A city in Vesper-Messina where Dolores Dei was crowned; its name means “Evening comes.”

A Mundi country within the Occidental sphere, represented among the Coalition powers occupying Revachol.

A major nation and cultural region on Mundi, historically involved in wars with Dolores Dei and later in the Coalition order.

A people associated with the Semenine Islands of Insulinde and an ancient migration from Iilmaraa.

A place or cultural region within Graad, used in the setting as a geographic and ethnolinguistic reference.

A city known for prestigious contemporary-art institutions, exhibition culture, and the social world surrounding them.

A cultural expert and special consultant to RCM Precinct 41 who helps explain Revachol's history, art, and urban geography.

A Martinaise resident whom Harry first meets while searching for her missing husband, before becoming involved in her family's tragedy.

Julia Dobreva and Jean Abadanaiz, celebrated communist revolutionaries whose names function as symbols, passwords, and martyrs of the movement.

The setting's ordinary term for an automobile or motor vehicle.

The Coupris motor-carriage line represented most prominently by Kim Kitsuragi's blue-and-white patrol vehicle.

A motor-carriage model made by Coupris MotorCorp; Kim drives a heavily customised Kineema used as an RCM patrol vehicle.

Relating to aircraft that remain aloft through buoyancy, especially Elysium's airships and pale-traversing vehicles.

An airship or other buoyant flying craft used for transport, warfare, and travel through or above the pale.

A computer terminal that performs processing and storage through radio links to remote facilities rather than entirely inside the local machine.

A physical data-storage medium used by radiocomputers, carried as a removable filament or memory unit.

A Coalition military airship, part of the airborne force that monitors and occupies Revachol.

A military aviation unit operating aerostatic aircraft; revolutionary brigades gave rise to uniforms and salutes remembered in Revachol.

A backup of computer data stored away from the original workplace, such as the filament memory Soona retrieves from Fortress Accident.

A radio facility that receives and retransmits signals to extend communication and radiocomputer connections over long distances.

A radio-network frequency or calculation standard used by enthusiasts and by Ruby when constructing her pale latitude compressor.

Feld Electrical's experimental tape-based computer project, a failed predecessor of radiocomputing whose surviving prototypes became valuable artefacts.

Advanced protective armour made from ceramic materials, exceptionally resistant to bullets and worn by Krenel mercenaries.

A nearly invulnerable model of ceramic combat armour; the related Thought concludes that an attacker must aim for uncovered body parts.

An industrial conglomerate producing futuristic sportswear, motor lorries, buildings, and other modern consumer and transport designs.

The Interisolary Reál, Elysium's global reserve currency and the money used by the player in Revachol.

Discarded bottles and other returnable containers that can be collected and exchanged for small amounts of money.

A comic Thought that reimagines Harry's magnesium supplements as guided evolution beyond ordinary carbon-based humanity.

An emerging, synthesizer-driven electronic dance style associated with Jamrock clubs, portable music technology, and the church ravers.

The ravers' intensified form of anodic dance music and a wider aesthetic of maximal energy, repetition, drugs, and total commitment.

A Thought that turns Harry's fascination with hardcore culture into permission to consume even more drugs.

A criterion for an idea or beat whose parts make sense together on their own terms, even when the result is strange or extreme.

An Oranjese disc jockey and pioneer of anodic dance music whose tapes and performances influenced Revachol's emerging scene.

A devotee of high-speed, high-intensity music and motor culture; the term describes the church ravers' look and subculture.

A romantic Franconigerian cowboy-individualist archetype; Harry's Thought reduces adopting it to relentless cigarette smoking.

A fictional work or cultural ideal celebrating the muscular, self-reliant Franconigerian boiadeiro body.

A hypermasculine sword-and-sorcery hero from a popular fictional franchise of books, games, clothing, and adaptations.

A fictional Vespertine detective and hero of formulaic crime novels that shape Harry's idea of police work.

An ambitious unfinished radio-computer role-playing game developed by Fortress Accident before the studio collapsed.

The fantasy world and franchise surrounding the Man from Hjelmdall, used as shorthand for pulp heroic adventure.

A famous boxer said to have risen from the slums, overcome brain trauma, and defeat any opponent within three rounds.

A Thought that turns Contact Mike's underdog career into an obsessive stream of boxing clichés about attitude, competition, and winning.

A Psyche skill governing imagination, intuition, dreams, foreboding, and the ability to perceive meaning beyond ordinary sight.

A Physique skill that tunes Harry into Revachol itself, revealing distant scenes, old wrongs, weather, streets, and the city's voice.

A Psyche skill representing police culture, loyalty, and intuitive connection to Kim, Precinct 41, and other officers.

A Physique skill embodying fight-or-flight instinct, fear, aggression, threat detection, and the urge to intimidate before danger strikes.

An Intellect skill that reconstructs crime scenes and models trajectories, footprints, impacts, and other physical evidence.

A Psyche skill representing willpower, self-respect, morale, resistance to temptation, and the voice trying to keep Harry alive and sane.

A Motorics skill governing aim, precision, reflexive weapon handling, catching, and the coordination of sight with movement.

A Motorics skill combining stealth, acrobatics, style, improvisation, and the confidence to move through the world with panache.

A Motorics skill for understanding, repairing, manipulating, and connecting with machines, locks, circuits, tools, and fine mechanisms.

A Physique skill representing muscular strength, bodily technique, exercise, fighting, and direct physical solutions.

A Physique skill embodying appetite, intoxication, sex, pleasure, chemical knowledge, and the body's demand for more.

An Intellect skill for creativity, aesthetics, cultural interpretation, fresh associations, and making art or grand ideas.

A Motorics skill for maintaining posture and a poker face while reading cracks in other people's body language.

A Psyche skill for charm, persuasion, social manipulation, and making other people believe that Harry's desired outcome is their own.

A Psyche skill for dominance, command, intimidation, group power dynamics, and demanding respect.

An Intellect skill for acting, lying, inventing personas, theatrical performance, and recognising deception in others.

A Thought revealing Harry's childhood gang as an imaginary fifteenth industrial tribe; the other children are dead and only he remains.

A Thought about derealization that makes the familiar world feel newly strange and turns basic reality into something Harry must rediscover.

A comic Thought about forcing Harry's scattered body and mind back together until he can face the corpse without vomiting.

A tender memory of Harry and Dora parting in early-morning Revachol, imagined as signals carried between them by the ghost of the city.

A Thought tracing Harry's route toward a former home and lost life while exposing the pull of addiction and the fact that he no longer belongs there.

Revolutionary aerostatic-crew salutes that survive as apparently neutral Revacholian gestures and give Harry a moment of solidarity with Kim.

A Thought that turns Harry's apocalyptic cop persona into an intuition of an unknown event that will erase streets, stars, and the world itself.

A Thought that equips the Art Cop with an extravagant vocabulary of criticism and rewards aggressive judgements about art.

The Boring Cop Thought, celebrating Harry's difficult discovery that he can sometimes choose the ordinary, non-political, non-theatrical response.

The Sorry Cop Thought confronting Harry with real harms from his past and insisting that misery will keep winning unless he changes.

The Superstar Cop Thought that imagines police officers as rock-and-roll demigods and transforms Harry's grandiosity into an identity.

A Thought explaining Harry's stiff law-enforcement voice and jaw as consequences of childhood polio that he survived.

A Thought exposing Harry's deep technical obsession with motor carriages, engines, modifications, and mechanical diagnosis.

A Thought about a Vredefort contemporary-art centre that satirises the alliance of aesthetics, prestige, sparkling wine, and tax optimisation.

The Moralist Thought presenting centrism as control and preservation of the existing order rather than meaningful change.

A dissociative breakup Thought in which Harry rises above himself, shrinking his former home and wounded self into a distant white mourning.

A sensory memory of Harry's early romance with Dora, anchored to the smell of apricot gum, a streetcar, and their first kiss.

A Thought that turns Harry's vigilance for missing people into a fantasy of joining an RCM division dedicated to finding everyone who vanished.

A Thought that interprets Harry's temple-rubbing guesses as extrasensory perception and membership in a paranormal police unit.

A Thought reframing amnesia as memories stored away for Harry to reopen selectively, keeping still lifes and discarding the painful cast of his past.

A Thought identifying the persistent sensory echo in Harry's mind as the loss of the love of his life rather than a missing badge or gun.

A legendary cryptid described as a sound or divine whisper “light and low,” pursued through unusual acoustic traces.

A Thought that lets an unarmed Harry perform confidence and aggression by turning his hands into imaginary nine-millimetre pistols.

A Thought accepting that loss is unavoidable and the world is balanced on a knife-edge, while insisting that survival still requires fighting.

A Thought transforming Harry's habit of punching doors, machines, and furniture into a grand campaign against the material world.

A Thought imagining a route extending into the pale until all places, references, and identity disappear, ending in a desire to become unborn.

The sobriety Thought: physical recovery will take years, feel boring and unrewarded, but represents ordinary life without alcohol.

The Honour Cop Thought reducing honour to a solemn personal vow in which bravery, dignity, humility, and opposition to dishonour replace ordinary attachments.

An ultraliberal Thought that recasts taxes as hidden oppression and urges Harry to preach deregulation to ordinary Revacholians.

An entrepreneurial Thought treating failure as a reason to keep moving from one venture to the next faster than creditors and consequences can follow.

A dangerous suicidal Thought in which fantasies of being missed harden into a plan, linked to a song that has followed Harry since youth.

Jean-Luc, a Semenese union gate guard and racial supremacist whose pseudoscientific ideology becomes central to the fascist political quest.

A mentally ill former police-affiliated woman who impersonates an officer using Harry's lost gun, badge, sirens, and fragments of cop language.

Lilienne Carter's occupational nickname, identifying her as a fishing-village resident who earns a living from nets and the sea.

Raul Kortenaer, the Krenel mercenary commander disguised as the leader of strikebreakers outside the harbour.

An armed group led by Titus Hardie that enforces the dockworkers' union's authority and acts as Martinaise's unofficial police.

Roustame Diodore, an ultrarich investor whose wealth is represented so extremely that light appears to bend around him.

The generic label initially given to Billie Méjean before Harry learns her name and becomes involved in her family's tragedy.

Gary's epithet, describing a man whose Revacholian nationalist and racist beliefs are partly hidden behind conspiracy talk and evasions.

Cuno and Cunoesse are two drug-using children beside the crime scene; Cuno is loud and abusive, while Cunoesse is the more dangerous influence.

A nickname for Harry created from reports of his drunken breakdown, reckless driving, and repeated declarations that the end was coming.

One of the mythic or evasive identities Harry can adopt while trying to avoid or reconstruct his real name.

An elaborate false name Harry invents for himself, expressing his desire for a grander and more heroic identity.

A former disco superstar idolised by young Harry, whose look and fixed grin inspired Harry's permanent facial tic.

The fixed disco grin Harry trained from Guillaume le Million and can no longer easily remove from his face.

A homeless alcoholic who narrates the long sequence of business, relationship, and personal failures that produced his self-chosen name.

A severely intoxicated member of the Union of Moribund Alcoholics who repeats a plea not to call Abigail.

A member of the fishing-village alcoholics who trades information and small goods while drinking with Idiot Doom Spiral and Don't Call Abigail.

An ecstatic anodic-music raver and DJ whose repetitive “hard core” cries conceal strong musical intuition and optimism.

The unfinished anodic track played by Egg Head; Harry can make it harder core by identifying the missing bass and melody.

The ravers' carpenter and theorist, sceptical of institutions and obsessed with whether music, architecture, and ideas are internally coherent.

Harry's deliberately or helplessly ungrammatical sexual proposition, used as a comic expression of damaged social instinct and desire.

Hand/Eye Coordination's name for Harry's gun and a martial awakening: a variation on “prepare for war” spoken against approaching nothingness.

French for “One day I will return to your side,” painted by Cindy over the Whirling-in-Rags after the tribunal as a promise of return.

A hopeful message Harry can choose for the public wall, asserting future beauty against Martinaise's ruin and political defeat.

Steban's question about whether revolutionary hope, beauty, and ideals should be abandoned merely because the present is dark.

A line from Harry's dream of Dolores/Dora arguing that the deepest suffering is not abstract horror but loss wearing the face of someone loved.

A fragmented police mantra and musical motif that turns the detective's entrance into a dramatic act of identity and purpose.

Egg Head's maximalist rallying cry for anodic dance music, escalating “hard core” into an ecstatic statement of total commitment.

The ravers' approval that a beat or idea works according to its own logic, a key principle in Noid's aesthetic vocabulary.

A deliberately extreme revolutionary slogan that denies solidarity with the owning class and exposes communism's dehumanising rhetorical edge.

The classic international communist rallying cry, used in Elysium to frame class struggle as a cause shared across nations and isolas.

A declaration that there can be no compromise with the inner forces of guilt, rage, grief, and self-destruction pursuing Harry.

A Dolorian maxim presenting history and existence as a cycle that continues from life to death and eventually from the pale back to the world.

Revachol's voice, heard through Shivers, asking Harry to remain alert and keep the city present through attention and care.

The Insulindian Phasmid's judgement of humanity and Harry: destructive and unstable, yet astonishingly new, persistent, and miraculous.

Volition's defence of continued existence: Harry's present may be damaged and limited, but it remains a real place from which to live.

Dolores/Dora's dream line describing heartbreak as an inner death that precedes physical death and permanently changes Harry.

Harry's panic at finding consciousness trapped inside an unfamiliar body and mind, compressing his amnesia into existential horror.

Harry's statement of moral exhaustion and desire to stop being the addicted, harmful person produced by his past behaviour.

A civic imperative to act not for personal glory but for Revachol and the people whose lives the investigation affects.

The Revachol Citizens Militia's official slogan, turning police duty into a warning that humanity must remain watchful.

An emphatic fan-like summary of the game's loyalty to Kim: threatening or betraying him violates the partnership at the story's moral centre.

A high-value Authority check modifier showing that Harry has earned Kim's unusually deep confidence through his choices.

Garte's crude misogynistic expression for imagined promiscuity, used while speculating about Sylvie's life after leaving the Whirling.

Measurehead's racist insult for white Occidentals, reducing them to a bland food stereotype within his invented racial hierarchy.

A phrase whose meaning depends on speaker and tone, ranging from civic pride to the Racist Lorry Driver's hostile declaration of who belongs in the city.