Stopwords

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Very common words such as "the" or "and" that search engines and text analysis tools ignore when processing language
2. Frequently used function words like articles and conjunctions that are excluded from indexing and natural language processing
3. High-frequency words with little individual meaning that are removed from text before it is searched or analysed by software

Etymology: "Stopwords" is the plural of "stopword," a compound formed from "stop" and "word." Here "stop" is used in the older sense of a blocking or filtering device, so the compound describes a word that gets filtered out or stopped from consideration. In practice the term names the common, high-frequency words such as "the," "of," and "and" that search engines and text-analysis programs typically skip because they carry little meaning on their own. The plural form matters because the term is almost always used for the whole set of such words, as in a list of stopwords that a program removes before processing a document. The word is thus a plain English combination with no borrowed or disguised history, and its meaning comes directly from the two parts put together.