intention

Pluralintentions

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A planned course of action that someone has decided to follow.

   His intention all along had been to sell the company quietly.

   She declared her intention to run for office next year.

   Similarplan, aim, intent, goal, purpose

   Note

   The everyday sense, and the one that carries the fixed phrases. Have no intention of doing something is the standard flat refusal, and good intentions anchors the proverb Hell is paved with good intentions, attributed to Samuel Johnson. The noun takes of with an -ing form or to with an infinitive: no intention of fulfilling it, her intention to run. It belongs to a person; the 'purpose' meaning can belong to a law or a book.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The goal or purpose behind an action, statement, or decision.

   The intention behind the new policy is to reduce food waste.

   I never doubted the good intention behind her blunt advice.

   Similarpurpose, aim, goal, objective, intent

   Note

   Here the purpose belongs to a thing as readily as to a person: a law, a policy, a book. The usual frame is formal and impersonal (the intention of this legislation is to…, it is not the intention of the book to…), and it suits prefaces, reports and official prose. Purpose or aim can usually stand in its place without changing the meaning.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The biological process by which a wound repairs itself and closes.

   The surgeon closed the incision neatly to promote healing by first intention.

   Because the tissue loss was extensive, the wound healed by second intention over several weeks.

   Note

   Medicine keeps the word alive in a fixed frame: healing by primary intention, by first intention, by second intention. The ordinal names the route the healing takes. In primary intention, as Braun and Anderson's Pathophysiology (2007) puts it, the wound is closed and all its areas connect and heal at the same time. Primary and first name the same route.

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