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intensive purposes or intents and purposes?
If you are casting about for the phrase that is used to say that “one thing has the same effect or result as something else,” you are looking for for all intents and purposes; you are not looking for intensive purposes. Your purposes may indeed be intensive in some way (we don’t want to know the details), but these two words are not commonly found together as an idiom. The pairing of intents and purposes comes from a 1546 Act of Parliament conveying that King Henry VIII had unlimited power to interpret laws; it contained the phrase “to all intents, constructions, and purposes.”
Synonyms
Examples of intensive in a Sentence
Tharin Pillay, TIME, 8 Jan. 2025
At present, nitrogen fixation—the chemical process required to produce ammonia from nitrogen gas—is hugely energy intensive, accounting for as much as two percent of the world’s annual energy budget.
—Charina Chou, Foreign Affairs, 7 Jan. 2025
Emily McClanathan, Chicago Tribune, 13 Jan. 2025
Applications are now open for the SXSW Sydney edition of the American Pavilion Worldwide Student Program, an educational intensive that gives students from a variety of disciplines an opportunity to immerse themselves in the Australian branch of the multipronged media festival.
—Christian Zilko, IndieWire, 8 July 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Intensive.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intensive. Accessed 18 Jan. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
intensive
1 of 2 adjective
intensive
2 of 2 nounMedical Definition
intensive
adjective
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