Glossary

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

A 7-bit character encoding standard representing 128 characters including English letters, digits, and control codes.

BOM

Byte Order Mark

A special Unicode character at the start of a file indicating its encoding and byte order.

Case Conversion

Text Case Conversion

Transforming text between uppercase, lowercase, title case, sentence case, or camelCase formats.

CJK

Chinese, Japanese, Korean Characters

A collective term for the writing systems of East Asian languages, requiring multi-byte character encodings.

Diacritics

Diacritical Marks

Marks added above, below, or through letters to alter pronunciation (e.g. accents, umlauts, cedillas).

Escape Character

A character (usually backslash) that gives special meaning to the following character in a string.

Grep

Global Regular Expression Print

A command-line tool for searching text using regular expression patterns, foundational in Unix workflows.

Kerning

Typographic Kerning

Adjusting the horizontal spacing between specific pairs of characters for visually balanced text.

Leading

Line Spacing (Leading)

The vertical distance between lines of text, measured from baseline to baseline.

Ligature

Typographic Ligature

Two or more characters combined into a single glyph for aesthetic or readability purposes (e.g. fi, fl, ae).

Line Ending

Line Ending Character

The invisible character(s) marking the end of a line — CR+LF on Windows, LF on Unix/macOS.

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum Placeholder Text

Pseudo-Latin placeholder text used in design and typesetting to simulate the appearance of real content.

N-gram

A contiguous sequence of n items from a text, used in natural language processing and text analysis.

Normalization (Text)

Unicode Normalization

Converting Unicode text to a canonical form (NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD) so equivalent characters compare as equal.

Plain Text

Plain Text File

A file containing only unformatted characters with no styling, layout, or embedded objects.

Readability Score

A numerical measure of how easy text is to read, using formulas like Flesch-Kincaid or Gunning Fog Index.

Rich Text

Rich Text Format

A text format that supports formatting such as bold, italics, fonts, and colors across different applications.

ROT13

ROT13 Cipher

A simple letter substitution cipher replacing each letter with the one 13 positions later in the alphabet.

RTL

Right-to-Left Text

Text written from right to left, used in Arabic, Hebrew, and other scripts, requiring bidirectional layout.

Slug

URL Slug

A URL-friendly version of a string with spaces replaced by hyphens and special characters removed.

Stemming

Word Stemming

Reducing words to their root form by removing suffixes (e.g. 'running' to 'run') for text analysis.

String Distance

String Distance Metric

A measure of how different two strings are, calculated using algorithms like Levenshtein or Hamming distance.

String Interpolation

Embedding variable values inside a string template, replacing placeholders with actual data at runtime.

Text Diff

Text Difference Comparison

An algorithm that compares two text documents and highlights additions, deletions, and modifications between them.

Text Encoding

Text Character Encoding

The scheme used to represent characters as bytes — including UTF-8, UTF-16, ISO-8859-1, and Windows-1252.

Tokenization

Text Tokenization

Splitting text into meaningful units (tokens) such as words, sentences, or subword pieces for processing.

Transliteration

Script Transliteration

Converting text from one writing system to another letter by letter (e.g. Cyrillic to Latin).

Truncation

Text Truncation

Shortening text to a specific length, typically adding an ellipsis to indicate omitted content.

Unicode

Unicode Standard

A universal character encoding standard assigning a unique code point to every character in every writing system.

Whitespace

Whitespace Characters

Invisible characters including spaces, tabs, newlines, and carriage returns that affect text layout.

Word Count

Word Count Analysis

Counting the number of words in a text, often including character, sentence, and paragraph counts.