{
  "id": "lead.guide",
  "term": "lead",
  "sense": "guide",
  "pos": "verb",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 10,
  "arena": "lead",
  "domain": "building",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "to go before and cause others to follow",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "go.movement",
      "others.distinct-entities",
      "cause.reason",
      "time.dimension"
    ],
    "interaction": "a movement occurs before others in time and causes distinct entities to follow",
    "novel_properties": [
      "temporal precedence",
      "causal leadership",
      "directed following"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Marie Curie led the first military X-ray units in World War I, training 150 technicians and deploying 20 mobile units.",
      "domain": "history"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Voyager 1 probe led the way out of the solar system, crossing the heliopause in 2012 at 17 km/s.",
      "domain": "spaceflight"
    },
    {
      "text": "Linus Torvalds led the development of the Linux kernel from 1991, coordinating contributions from thousands of programmers.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "action.deed",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    },
    {
      "id": "control.ability",
      "note": "enables",
      "type": "enables"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "cusp.threshold"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "lead",
    "leading",
    "leads",
    "led"
  ],
  "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": "definition",
      "note": "Added 'cause.reason' and 'time.dimension' as required for 'go before' and 'cause to follow'. Definition tightened to remove self-reference to 'lead' while preserving meaning."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-lead.guide"
}