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{{Short description|Alphabetical list of terms relevant to a certain field of study or action}}
{{For|Wikipedia's glossary|Wikipedia:Glossary|selfref=yes}}
{{Further|Wikipedia:Contents/Glossaries}}

[[File:Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn 'Ali al-Muqri al Fayyumi - Glossary of Islamic Legal Terminology - Walters W590 - Bottom Exterior.jpg|thumb|right |A glossary of [[Islamic law|Islamic legal]] terminology]]

A '''glossary''' (from {{langx|grc|γλῶσσα}}, ''glossa''; language, speech, wording), also known as a '''vocabulary''' or '''clavis''', is an alphabetical list of [[Term (language)|terms]] in a particular [[domain of knowledge]] with the [[definition]]s for those terms.{{Citation needed|date=March 2023}} Traditionally, a glossary appears at the end of a [[book]] and includes terms within that book that are either newly introduced, uncommon, or specialized. While glossaries are most commonly associated with [[non-fiction]] books, in some cases, [[fiction]] novels sometimes include a glossary for unfamiliar terms.

A bilingual glossary is a list of terms in one language defined in a second language or [[Gloss (annotation)|glossed]] by [[synonym]]s (or at least near-synonyms) in another language.

In a general sense, a glossary contains explanations of [[concept]]s relevant to a certain field of study or action. In this sense, the term is related to the notion of [[Ontology (information science)|ontology]]. Automatic methods have been also provided that transform a glossary into an ontology<ref>R. Navigli, P. Velardi. [http://www.dsi.uniroma1.it/~navigli/pubs/Navigli_Velardi_IOS_2008.pdf From Glossaries to Ontologies: Extracting Semantic Structure from Textual Definitions], Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge (P. Buitelaar and P. Cimiano, Eds.),  Series information for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, 2008, pp. 71-87.</ref> or a computational lexicon.<ref>R. Navigli. [http://www.dsi.uniroma1.it/~navigli/pubs/EACL_2009_Navigli.pdf Using Cycles and Quasi-Cycles to Disambiguate Dictionary Glosses], Proc. of 12th Conference of the European Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009), Athens, Greece, March 30-April 3rd, 2009, pp. 594-602.</ref>

== Core glossary ==
[[File:Intelligence Law Glossary 2011.pdf|thumb|right|200px|The intelligence law glossary provides a description of the key terms in intelligence law.]]

A ''core glossary'' is a simple glossary or [[explanatory dictionary]] that 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.

== Automatic extraction of glossaries ==
[[Text processing|Computational approaches]] to the automated extraction of glossaries from corpora<ref>J. Klavans and S. Muresan. [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smara/publications/klavans-amia01.pdf Evaluation of the Definder System for Fully Automatic Glossary Construction] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191222044813/http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smara/publications/klavans-amia01.pdf |date=2019-12-22 }}. In ''Proc. of American Medical Informatics Association Symp.'', 2001, pp. 324–328.</ref> or the Web<ref>A. Fujii, T. Ishikawa. [http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P00-1062 Utilizing the World Wide Web as an Encyclopedia: Extracting Term Descriptions from Semi-Structured Texts]. In ''Proc. 38th Ann. Meeting Assoc. for Computational Linguistics'', 2000, pp. 488–495.</ref><ref>P. Velardi, R. Navigli, P. D'Amadio. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4629722/;jsessionid=6EA3B4D4BD97E08BFCF5252EC653A1EA?arnumber=4629722 Mining the Web to Create Specialised Glossaries], IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(5), IEEE Press, 2008, pp. 18-25.</ref> have been developed in the recent years{{clarify timeframe|date=April 2025}}. These methods typically start from domain [[terminology]] and extract one or more glosses for each term of interest. Glosses can then be analyzed to extract [[hypernym]]s of the defined term and other lexical and semantic relations.

== See also ==
* [[Controlled vocabulary]]
* [[Dictionary]]
* ''[[Frahang-i Pahlavig]]'', a glossary of Pahlavi logograms
* [[Index (publishing)]]
* [[Terminology extraction]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

== External links ==
{{Wiktionary|glossary}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060320132442/http://www.glossarist.com/ glossarist.com: The Glossarist] - Large list of glossaries
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20050915123957/http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tao.html www.ontopia.net: The TAO of Topic Maps]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20080820180152/http://www.babel-linguistics.com/glossaries.htm www.babel-linguistics.com: Babel Linguistics Glossaries] Selected Multilingual Glossaries by Industry
* {{Cite EB1911|wstitle=Gloss, Glossary|volume=12|pages=124–128|first=John Henry|last=Hessels}} This provides a detailed description of the development of glossaries in classical languages.

{{Book structure}}
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[[Category:Glossaries| ]]
[[Category:Book design]]
[[Category:Lexicography]]