What is Glossary?
A glossary also known as a vocabulary, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Most industries have their own specialized vocabularies of words or phrases that might not be familiar to the overall public. Industries might have given a special meaning to a standard word or phrase. Some terms may even be specific to company, or product if the company has developed something unique.
Glossary Management
One challenge that content creators face is to ensure that readers understand company specific terms, acronyms, and abbreviations used within knowledge articles without disrupting the flow of content. Editors define a term once and link back thereto, or redundantly add definitions into the content of their articles by copying and pasting or retyping, which is a complete waste of time and leads to inconsistencies of redundant data. PHPKB knowledge base software addresses this challenge with an in-built Glossary Management section with autolink facility where you can define a term once and leave the rest on software.
PHPKB will autolink glossary terms with their definitions wherever they are detected in the article body (content) and users can view the definition in pop-up just by hovering over the term.
PHPKB allows you define unlimited glossary terms to improve consistency in your documentation while minimizing redundant work and keeping your documents clean.
Multilingual Glossary
PHPKB offers you to define multilingual glossary. Defining specialized terms correctly and consistently in the user's language ensures clear communication with potential customers. The wrong terms can cause misunderstanding, confusion, and lost sales. Even though the potential customers “know what you mean,” but you not knowing the proper term for something in their language is likely to make them less trustful towards your product or service.
Having the language specific terms and definitions will aid in multilingual keyword search and multilingual SEO. Optimizing not only your content but also special terms in different languages makes you searchable in new markets and people in different countries can find you.
Why is having a glossary important?
- A list of key terms, along with their definitions, will help ensure that the correct terms are consistently used throughout the text. Without the glossary the writer needs to define the same term over and again, and therefore the term is often defined differently, which might cause inconsistent data.
- Using a glossary can also have an added bonus of speeding up the content writing process. Writers can focus more on content generation rather than continually defining the term repeatedly.
What should be included?
A glossary should be clear and concise. It should be easy-to-use and only contain the required terms, as too many will disrupt the graceful reading experience of user. Terms and phrases should be business-specific and not generic or industrywide, and their definitions should not only contain their meaning but also contextual information.
- Some examples:
- All branded names, registered trademarks etc.
- Abbreviations
- Acronyms
- Frequently used terms
- Job titles
- Department names
An effective glossary serves as a guide and provide relevant information about specific terms.
