The norito recited in shrines today are not a diffuse oral inheritance but substantially the same texts collected in the Engishiki, a compilation of court and religious procedure completed in 927 during the Heian period, whose final books preserve a set of norito considered authoritative models for the genre, meaning a priest performing a formal norito today is very often reciting, or closely following the style of, wording that has survived essentially intact for over a thousand years. Among the norito preserved from this early collection, the Oharae no Kotoba, the great purification liturgy, is the most widely known and continuously used, a long invocation calling for the removal of accumulated impurity and transgression that remains part of the regular purification rites performed at shrines nationwide, including the major nationwide purification ceremonies held twice a year at the end of June and December, giving contemporary practitioners direct, ongoing contact with Heian-era liturgical language most other aspects of daily Japanese religious life have no equivalent connection to.
The archaic vocabulary and grammar of these texts, quite distant from ordinary modern Japanese, is itself understood within the tradition as part of what makes the recitation effective, the elevated, deliberately unfamiliar register marking the words as set apart from everyday speech in the same way the ritual setting itself is set apart from ordinary space, so that a modern listener who cannot fully parse the archaic grammar is nonetheless receiving the liturgy in essentially the form Heian-era compilers fixed it in, rather than a paraphrase updated for present-day comprehension.