keyword
keyword Lexical Profile
keyword Game Scores & Validity
• noun
An informative word or phrase used in an information retrieval system, database, or search engine to indicate the content of a document and facilitate searches.
"Typing a specific keyword into the library catalog will help you find relevant academic articles quickly."
A word of great significance that captures the central idea, guiding principle, or main focus of a text, speech, or endeavor.
"Efficiency was the keyword during the company's annual restructuring meeting."
A reserved word in a computer programming language that has a predefined syntactic meaning and cannot be used as an arbitrary identifier.
"In most programming languages, you cannot name a variable after a built-in keyword."
A word used as a key to encipher or decipher a cryptographic message.
"Without the secret keyword, the intercepted cipher could not be translated into plain text."
• verb
To assign descriptive tags or index terms to a digital file, photograph, or document so that it can be easily located in a database.
"The archivist spent the afternoon keywording thousands of historical photographs for the online collection."
Word Origin & Etymology
Formed in the mid-19th century as a compound of 'key' and 'word', originally referring to a word that serves as a key to deciphering a cryptogram before later being adopted in library science and computing.