{
  "id": "important.significance",
  "term": "important",
  "sense": "significance",
  "pos": "adjective",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "general",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "an item that has more meaning and more value than most items",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "meaning.significance",
      "value.worth",
      "items.object",
      "mean.signify"
    ],
    "interaction": "their higher degree together makes a thing stand out as significant",
    "novel_properties": [
      "relative distinction",
      "elevated standing",
      "comparative weight"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Library of Alexandria housed over 400,000 scrolls, making it the most significant collection of knowledge in the ancient Mediterranean.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "Plutonium-239 is crucial in nuclear weapons because its half-life of 24,100 years allows for sustained chain reactions.",
      "domain": "physics"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Bitcoin blockchain's genesis block, mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, holds irreversible historical and cryptographic value.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "meaning.significance",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "important is a kind of significance"
    },
    {
      "id": "value.worth",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "important carries extra worth"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "major.importance",
    "primary.importance"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "important",
    "importantly"
  ],
  "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 missing constitutive components 'items.object' and 'mean.signify' to align with definition. Definition remains unchanged as it correctly reflects the emergent concept."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-important.significance"
}