{
  "id": "help.assistance",
  "term": "help",
  "sense": "assistance",
  "pos": "verb",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 5,
  "arena": "lexicon",
  "domain": "help",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "to make another thing change when it can not change by itself",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "interaction.process",
      "difference.relation"
    ],
    "interaction": "when a thing can change and interacts with another thing that has a difference the interaction makes the other thing change",
    "novel_properties": [
      "shared intention",
      "voluntary assistance"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake shifted Earth's axis by 17 centimeters, altering its rotation permanently.",
      "domain": "geophysics"
    },
    {
      "text": "In 2008, the Federal Reserve injected $85 billion into AIG to prevent cascading financial collapse.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Linux 2.6 kernel update fixed a race condition that had caused system freezes on multi-core processors.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "interaction.process",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "advice.social",
    "care.emotional",
    "education.learning",
    "friendly.social",
    "good.moral",
    "guide.person",
    "insurance.financial",
    "please.politeness",
    "request.social",
    "services.economic",
    "support.assistance",
    "tools.tool"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "help",
    "helped",
    "helping",
    "helps"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-help.assistance"
}