De facto
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De facto (literally 'from fact'), describes real-world practices.
This term is often used to contrast with things that are officially recognized for formalized.
The term is probably most significant around law and governance - where the main alternative is 'de jure' ('from law'), but there are other uses.
De facto usually carries a sense of "the way we are doing things in practice, though".
For example,
- a de facto ruler is the one in real power, regardless of what the politics say
- a de facto standard is basically a strong convention that was never formalized
- somewhere on the scale of 'we never wrote it down but we all do it that way' or 'we did write it down, but never sat down to say to each other this is what we all do'