intensive

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.”