Stopword

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A common function word, such as "the" or "and", that is filtered out before searching or analyzing text
2. A very frequent word like "of" or "is" that search engines and language tools commonly skip because it carries little meaning
3. An ordinary term, such as a conjunction or article, that software discards during text analysis since it adds little useful information

Etymology: A stop word is a compound of "stop" and "word", the second of which is the familiar Old English term for a unit of speech. The pairing is transparent: these are words that stop, or halt, the flow of a search or a sentence in the sense that they carry little meaning of their own. In the technical sense that gives the term its modern use, a stop word is one that is filtered out before text is processed, most often by search engines and text-analysis software, which ignore very common items such as "the", "of" and "and". Note that the word "stop" here does not refer to the sense of halting a moving object, but to the act of blocking or excluding something from consideration. The compound is therefore a plain description of function rather than a historical coinage with a notable first user.

Synonyms: function word

Antonyms: content word