{
  "id": "south.direction",
  "term": "south",
  "sense": "direction",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 13,
  "arena": "lexicon_entry",
  "domain": "everyday",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "the side of a place that is down in the usual map arrangement of space",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "side.surface",
      "arrangement.spatial",
      "map.spatial",
      "space.extent",
      "usual.common"
    ],
    "interaction": "When a side of a place is identified as the down-facing side in the common map arrangement of space, the concept of south emerges.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "directional orientation",
      "conventional spatial reference",
      "relative positional identity"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "In Beijing’s Forbidden City, the main halls face south to honor solar warmth, a practice in Ming Dynasty urban design.",
      "domain": "architecture"
    },
    {
      "text": "Australia’s national highway signs mark 'south' based on the standard orientation of official topographic maps published by Geoscience Australia.",
      "domain": "geography"
    },
    {
      "text": "During the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, rescue teams used GPS coordinates to determine that the epicenter was 80 km west-northwest of Chengdu.",
      "domain": "disaster_response"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "top.upper",
      "note": "contrasts-with",
      "type": "contrasts-with"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "south",
    "souths"
  ],
  "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 'space.extent' and 'usual.common' to components to align with concepts implicitly required by the definition. These were already foundational in the lexical structure and are non-circular. Defin"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-south.direction"
}