A meta-disciplinary definition of priming, tested against a verbatim-grounded corpus

Priming is studied in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, social psychology, marketing, economics, education, linguistics and political science, but the fields rarely cite one another and have never agreed what would count as an instance. This preprint states a meta-disciplinary definition — three jointly sufficient characteristics (association, secondariness, modulation) with an operational ABCD notation for prime, target, baseline outcome and measured outcome — and then tests it systematically. The test is a verbatim-grounded audit of 39 tagged papers across 9 disciplines, in which every judgement is anchored to an exact sentence in the paper's own text. Association and modulation hold throughout, but these follow structurally from the tagged slots and so verify tagging completeness rather than the definition. Only secondariness can fail, and the pattern of its failures is the contribution: an automated lexical screen flags seven papers, and close adjudication shows that secondariness fails exactly when the prime is processed directly — when it becomes an object of response in its own right rather than acting on the task from behind. Stimulus identity (repetition priming) is only one route onto that direct pathway; being explicitly taught and being embedded in the target are others. Two controls support the result. A discipline-span null (exact hypergeometric) shows the priming cluster is genuinely concentrated rather than a common word scattered at random. And the definition is executable: the same two failure routes are implemented as a design-time check in an open experiment builder (PrimingToolbox), so the definition applies backwards to papers written without it and forwards to experiments not yet run. Limitations are stated plainly: the priming coding is single-coder (the measured κ = 0.767 covers the statistical tag layer, not this one), the corpus is curated rather than sampled, and the prototype demonstrates expressibility, not adoption.