{
  "id": "greater-than-the-sum.excess",
  "term": "greater than the sum",
  "sense": "excess",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "systems",
  "domain": "emergence",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "a whole whose boundary contains interaction among parts that changes the state of the whole in a way not possible in any part alone",
  "folk_gloss": "the whole is more than just its parts added together",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "boundary.limit",
      "interaction.process",
      "state.condition",
      "whole.complete",
      "part.relation"
    ],
    "interaction": "interaction.process",
    "novel_properties": [
      "state.condition"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2003 Northeast Blackout spread across eight states when one overloaded transmission line in Ohio triggered cascading failures.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "A beehive maintains temperature at 35°C even when individual bees cool or warm by fanning or clustering.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Bitcoin network confirms transactions only when a majority of nodes agree, preventing any single actor from altering the ledger.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "used_by": [
    "going-viral.excess",
    "on-the-same-wavelength.resonance",
    "team-spirit.excess",
    "word-of-mouth.excess"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "greater than the sum"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "phrases:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.7,
    "sources": [
      "folk phrase — the whole exceeding its parts"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-greater-than-the-sum.excess"
}