{
  "id": "official.authority",
  "term": "official",
  "sense": "authority",
  "pos": "adjective",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 11,
  "arena": "official",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "thing that is made by law and issued by government",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "law.rule",
      "government.administrative",
      "issue.problem",
      "make.verb"
    ],
    "interaction": "law and government together respond to a problem, making and issuing a formal directive through structured authority",
    "novel_properties": [
      "formal issuance",
      "binding status",
      "authorized enforcement"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The U.S. Census is conducted every ten years as mandated by Article I of the Constitution.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "The European Medicines Agency issued conditional marketing authorization for Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020.",
      "domain": "government"
    },
    {
      "text": "California's AB 1482 law imposes rent caps on buildings constructed over 15 years ago starting in 2020.",
      "domain": "law"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "law.rule",
      "note": "abstracts",
      "type": "abstracts"
    },
    {
      "id": "government.administrative",
      "note": "abstracts",
      "type": "abstracts"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "official",
    "officials"
  ],
  "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 'issue.problem' and 'make.verb' to align record with definition's reliance on 'made' and 'issued'."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-official.authority"
}