{
  "id": "purpose.goal",
  "term": "purpose",
  "sense": "goal",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 9,
  "arena": "emergenceLexicon",
  "domain": "common",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a goal that is about why a thing is done",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "goal.purpose",
      "meaning.significance"
    ],
    "interaction": "the goal and meaning together are about why a thing is done",
    "novel_properties": [
      "reason for action",
      "intentional direction"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Mars Curiosity rover continues analyzing soil samples a decade after landing, despite planned mission duration of 687 Earth days.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "The U.S. Federal Reserve raised interest rates to 5.25% in 2023 to curb inflation, aiming to stabilize the dollar's purchasing power.",
      "domain": "economics"
    },
    {
      "text": "Photosystem II in spinach chloroplasts splits water molecules to sustain electron flow for sugar synthesis during daylight hours.",
      "domain": "biology"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "goal.purpose",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "application.use",
    "club.social",
    "function.purpose",
    "fund.financial",
    "organization.administrative",
    "project.plan"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "purpose",
    "purposed",
    "purposes",
    "purposing"
  ],
  "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-purpose.goal"
}