A glossary is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a glossary appears at the end of a book and includes terms within that book which are either newly introduced or at least uncommon.

A bilingual glossary is a list of terms in one language which are defined in a second language or glossed by synonyms (or at least near-synonyms) in another language.

In a more general sense, a glossary contains explanations of concepts relevant to a certain field of study or action. In this sense, the term is contemporaneously related to ontology.

Core glossary

A core glossary is a simple glossary or defining dictionary which enables definition of other concepts, especially for newcomers to a language or field of study. It contains a small working vocabulary and definitions for important or frequently encountered concepts, usually including idioms or metaphors useful in a culture.

In computer science, a core glossary is a prerequisite to a core ontology. An example of this is seen in SUMO.

Searching glossaries on the web

The search engine Google provides a service to only search web pages belonging to a glossary therefore providing access to a kind of compound glossary of glossary entries found on the web. A research work on automated glossary extraction has been recently published.

See also

• Terminology extraction

External links

• The Glossarist - Large list of glossaries
• The TAO of Topic Maps
• Glossarytool - tool for glossary generation
• Online glossary software - Make your own public glossaries
• GlossExtractor - A web application to automatically learn specialized glossaries from the web
• Babel Linguistics Glossaries Selected Multilingual Glossaries by Industry