The Typikon contains almost no prayers. It is the book about the books, the codified answer to a question that arises every single day of the Byzantine liturgical year: when the fixed calendar, the weekly cycle of tones and the moving cycle around Pascha all offer texts for the same service, what exactly is sung, in what order, and what gives way? The Typikon ranks celebrations, from simple commemorations through feasts with great doxology or polyeleos to vigil-rank feasts, and attaches to each rank a recipe: how many stichera at Vespers and from which books, whether the Old Testament readings are appointed, which canons are combined at Matins and in what proportion, when a lesser observance is transferred or suppressed outright.
Older printed typika even carried a system of marks in the margin, signs of crosses and brackets denoting the rank at a glance. In parish practice the full prescriptions are almost never performed complete; received custom abbreviates them, and annually published liturgical calendars and ordo booklets do the daily arithmetic for clergy and choirs, which is itself an admission of the book's authority, since what they abbreviate is the Typikon's scheme. The word has a second, older sense: the founding charter of a monastery, the document in which a founder fixed the community's discipline, diet, governance and services. The liturgical book grew out of that world, and it never lost the monastery's assumption that worship is something a community does all day, every day, by rule.