{
  "id": "reference.citation",
  "term": "reference",
  "sense": "citation",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 13,
  "arena": "reference.word",
  "domain": "reference",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a link that connects to a place where information can be found",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "links.connection",
      "index.reference",
      "information.knowledge",
      "connects.verb",
      "space.extent"
    ],
    "interaction": "the connection bridges a reference and a location in space, enabling access to information",
    "novel_properties": [
      "directional access",
      "persistent location binding",
      "cross-context reference"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The 2017 Unicode Standard, version 10.0, assigns code point U+1F600 to the grinning face emoji.",
      "domain": "computing"
    },
    {
      "text": "Darwin cited Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population in his 1859 On the Origin of Species.",
      "domain": "science"
    },
    {
      "text": "The US Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision was cited in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).",
      "domain": "law"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "links.connection",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    },
    {
      "id": "information.knowledge",
      "note": "abstracts",
      "type": "abstracts"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "the-three-tiers.structure"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "refer",
    "reference",
    "referenced",
    "references",
    "referencing"
  ],
  "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 missing constitutive concepts 'connects.verb' and 'space.extent' to align record with definition. Tightened definition to avoid redundancy while preserving meaning."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-reference.citation"
}