{
  "id": "effective.useful",
  "term": "effective",
  "sense": "useful",
  "pos": "adjective",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 12,
  "arena": "effective",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a property that causes work to result in a benefit",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "property.attribute",
      "work.effort",
      "outcome.result",
      "benefits.advantage",
      "cause.reason",
      "results.outcome"
    ],
    "interaction": "the property links work effort with a beneficial outcome by causing the effort to produce that outcome",
    "novel_properties": [
      "causal linkage between effort and benefit",
      "productive efficiency",
      "purposeful result generation"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2020 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduced symptomatic COVID-19 by 95% in clinical trials.",
      "domain": "medicine"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Panama Canal's lock system lifts ships 26 meters to cross the continental divide efficiently.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "Python's pandas library processes terabytes of data daily in production systems at Netflix.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "effective"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "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": "components",
      "note": "Added 'cause.reason' and 'results.outcome' to components because the definition relies on causation and outcomes as constitutive; kept definition unchanged as it correctly reflects the emergent concep"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-effective.useful"
}