{
  "id": "winter-of-discontent.strikes",
  "term": "winter of discontent",
  "sense": "strikes",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A period in which many members of a collective self act together on grievance against the walls those who govern set, kept later in its narrative.",
  "folk_gloss": "a period of widespread strikes and public dissatisfaction, after Britain's winter of 1978-79",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "collective-self.shared",
      "grievance.held",
      "narrative.self-story",
      "period.temporal",
      "member.social",
      "act.deed",
      "against.opposition",
      "wall.range-end",
      "government.administrative",
      "set.fix",
      "keep.maintenance",
      "later.temporal"
    ],
    "interaction": "Grievances held separately become action together within one season; the narrative then keeps the season as a name for the reading it made of those who governed.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "grievance acted on together within one bounded time",
      "a season kept as a verdict in memory"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Britain's winter of 1978-79, marked by widespread public-sector strikes, is called the Winter of Discontent after the opening line of Shakespeare's Richard III.",
      "domain": "history"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "sense-of-grievance.collective",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "the sense is held; the winter is when it is acted on"
    },
    {
      "id": "outrage-of-the-week.serial",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "outrage passes unacted; a winter of discontent is action that stays in the narrative"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "winter of discontent"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-winter-of-discontent.strikes"
}