Status words name where a relationship stands, or how it is shown to other people: exclusive, defined, courting, platonic, public. They are the oldest vocabulary in this dictionary, and the best documented. Most of them are ordinary English words that picked up a romantic sense and kept it.
That record is why this section can do something the slang section often cannot. It can say where a word came from and point at the evidence.
What do status words actually settle?
An agreement, or the absence of one. Exclusive means an agreement not to pursue anyone else. DTR refers to the conversation in which a relationship is named out loud, not to the status that conversation produces. Those two are constantly treated as one thing, and they are not.
For instance, two people can be exclusive in practice for months without a single defining conversation. They can also have that conversation and come out of it agreeing to nothing. The vocabulary keeps the agreement and the naming of it apart on purpose.
Why are the origins traceable here?
Because these words have a print history. The romantic sense of “date” and the older sense of “court” are both recorded in the lexicographic literature. Etymonline’s entry for date sets out when the courtship sense appears in English. That is a kind of evidence the app-era section almost never has.
Consider what that changes for a reader. When a word’s history is on record, an entry can explain why two people mean different things by it. When it is not, the entry can only report current use and say so plainly.
Where do status words collide?
At their edges, and predictably. Exclusive and committed, courting and dating, platonic and “just friends”: in each pair the words overlap in most conversations. Then they come apart in exactly the situation someone is trying to describe.
Platonic refers to a relationship without romantic or sexual involvement. It carries a philosophical history that has almost nothing to do with the modern use. It is a good example of a word whose origin explains its tone rather than its meaning.
What does this section deliberately not do?
It does not tell anyone when to have a defining conversation, or what status to want. Entries describe what the words mean when people use them, including the places where two readings collide.
It also does not treat any status as the destination. A dictionary can say what “exclusive” names. It has no view on whether anybody should be it.