Noun

(en noun)

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= A new prescription , passage=As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.}}

Any set of instructions for preparing a mixture of ingredients.

By extension, a plan or procedure to obtain a given end result.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2014-06-21, volume=411, issue=8892, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Magician’s brain , passage=[Isaac Newton] was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes. The truth is that Newton was very much a product of his time.}}

Now especially, a set of instructions for making or preparing food dishes.

A set of conditions and parameters of an industrial process to obtain a given result.

Noun

(en noun)

A cause:

# That which causes something: an efficient cause, a proximate cause.

#* 1996 , (w), : Evolution and the Meanings of Life , page 198:

There is a reason why so many should be symmetrical: The selective advantage in a symmetrical complex is enjoyed by all the subunits

# A motive for an action or a determination.

#* 1806 , Anonymous, Select Notes to Book XXI, in, (Alexander Pope), translator, The (Odyssey) of (Homer) , volume 6 (London, F.J. du Roveray), page 37:

This is the reason why he proposes to offer a libation, to atone for the abuse of the day by their diversions.

#* 1881 , (Henry James), (The Portrait of a Lady) , chapter 10:

Ralph Touchett, for reasons best known to himself, had seen fit to say that Gilbert Osmond was not a good fellow

# An excuse: a thought or a consideration offered in support of a determination or an opinion; that which is offered or accepted as an explanation.

#* 1966 , (Graham Greene), ((Penguin Classics) edition, ISBN 0140184945), page 14:

I have forgotten the reason' he gave for not travelling by air. I felt sure that it was not the correct ' reason , and that he suffered from a heart trouble which he kept to himself.

(label) Rational]] thinking (or the capacity for it; the cognitive [[faculty, faculties, collectively, of conception, judgment, deduction and intuition.

* 1970 , (Hannah Arendt), On Violence (ISBN 0156695006), page 62:

And the specific distinction between man and beast is now, strictly speaking, no longer reason (the lumen naturale of the human animal) but science

*{{quote-magazine, date=2014-06-21, volume=411, issue=8892, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Magician’s brain , passage=The [Isaac] Newton that emerges from the [unpublished] manuscripts is far from the popular image of a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason . The architect of modern science was himself not very modern. He was obsessed with alchemy.}}

(label) Something reasonable, in accordance with thought; justice.

* (rfdate) (Edmund Spenser):

I was promised, on a time, To have reason for my rhyme.

Ratio; proportion.

(Barrow)