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• noun
A person or thing that occupies the position or place of another person or thing, especially on a temporary basis until a permanent replacement is ready.
"The designer inserted a temporary image as a placeholder until the final photographs were approved."
In mathematics, logic, and computer science, a symbol or piece of text used in an expression or template that may be replaced by an actual value or specific data.
"In the database query, the question mark acts as a placeholder for the user's input."
In grammar, a word with little or no semantic content, such as the pronoun 'it' in 'it is raining', that is required solely to fulfill a syntactic rule.
"In the sentence 'There seems to be a problem,' the word 'there' functions as a grammatical placeholder."