{
  "id": "cause.reason",
  "term": "cause",
  "sense": "reason",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 3,
  "arena": "causes.reason",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "thing that brings about a change through interaction with another thing",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "change.process",
      "interaction.process",
      "happen.event-occurrence"
    ],
    "interaction": "change occurs when interaction between two things brings about an event that did not exist before",
    "novel_properties": [
      "causal agency",
      "temporal before-and-after",
      "mutual dependence"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2008 financial crisis began when subprime mortgage defaults cascaded through credit default swaps.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "A single lightning strike ignited the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, spreading over 590,000 hectares.",
      "domain": "environment"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL allowed attackers to read private server memory undetected for years.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "change.process",
      "note": "abstracts",
      "type": "abstracts"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "agency.capacity",
    "buffer.region",
    "chain-reaction.stacked",
    "drug.chemical",
    "effective.useful",
    "effects.result",
    "knock-on-effect.stacked",
    "lead.guide",
    "mar.damage",
    "opportunities.economic",
    "reason.causal",
    "ripple-effect.stacked",
    "sep.verb",
    "summer.season"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "cause",
    "caused",
    "causes",
    "causing"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "definition",
      "note": "added happen.event-occurrence as it is conceptually necessary for 'cause' to imply occurrence in time; definition tightened to better reflect core mechanism without redundancy or external concepts"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-cause.reason"
}