keyword

Language: en

🇬🇧 /ˈkiˌːwɜːd/ 🇺🇸 /ˈkiːˌwɜrd/

📖 Definitions

  1. noun
    A word or concept of great significance or importance, especially one that encapsulates the main idea of a text, topic, or field.; In information retrieval and search engines, a word or phrase used to search for or index documents and web pages.; In programming, a reserved word that has a special syntactic meaning and cannot be used as an identifier.; A word used as a key in a coded message or cipher system.
  2. verb
    To assign keywords to a document or piece of content for indexing or categorization purposes.

🔗 Details

Word forms

countable Plural: keywords 3rd sing.: keywords Past: keyworded Past part.: keyworded Pres part.: keywording

Collocations

keyword searchkeyword researchkeyword densitykeyword optimizationkeyword stuffingkeyword analysis

Derivatives

keywordingkeyword-richkeyword-based

Synonyms

key termtagdescriptorindex termsearch term

Commonly confused

key word
EN: 'Key word' (two words) is an older or more general form meaning an important word; 'keyword' (one word) is the standard spelling in computing, SEO, and information retrieval contexts.

Spelling tips

EN: In modern usage, especially in technology and SEO, 'keyword' is written as one word. The two-word form 'key word' is occasionally seen but is increasingly nonstandard.

💬 Examples

  1. The keyword for this chapter is 'sustainability'.

  2. She entered several keywords into the search engine to find relevant articles.

  3. In Python, 'if', 'else', and 'while' are keywords that cannot be used as variable names.

  4. The spy used a keyword to authenticate his identity to the handler.

  5. The librarian keyworded each article to make it easier to find in the database.