Writing Glossary

Clear definitions of every writing, grammar, typography, and readability term we reference across the site.

A

  • Active voice — The default grammatical construction where the subject performs the action.

B

  • Bingo (Scrabble) — Playing all 7 tiles on a single Scrabble turn for a 50-point bonus.

C

  • Character count — The total number of characters (letters, digits, punctuation, and usually spaces) in a text.

F

  • Flesch Reading Ease — A readability score from 0–100; higher is easier. 60–70 is recommended for most online writing.
  • Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level — A readability formula expressed as a US school grade — grade 8 means an eighth-grader could read it.

G

  • Gunning Fog Index — A readability formula that emphasises polysyllabic words; designed for business writing.

K

  • Keyword density — The percentage of total words a target keyword represents in a piece of text.

L

  • Lemma — The base form of a word — the entry you'd find in a dictionary.
  • Lorem ipsum — Dummy placeholder text derived from a corrupted Latin passage by Cicero.

N

  • N-gram — A contiguous sequence of n items (usually words or characters) from a text.

P

  • Passive voice — A grammatical construction where the object of an action becomes the sentence's subject.
  • Pomodoro Technique — A time-management method using 25-minute focus intervals separated by short breaks.

R

  • Readability — How easy a text is to read, typically measured by sentence length and word complexity.

S

  • Sentence case — A capitalisation style with only the first word and proper nouns capitalised.
  • SMOG Index — A readability formula calibrated for healthcare and patient-education writing.
  • Stop word — A high-frequency function word (the, a, of) usually filtered out of text analysis.
  • Syllable — A unit of pronunciation containing exactly one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants.

T

  • Title case — A capitalisation style where most words in a heading are capitalised.
  • Tokenization — Splitting text into the smallest meaningful units — usually words or characters.
  • Typing speed — How fast a typist can produce correct keystrokes, usually measured in WPM.

W

  • Word count — The total number of words in a text — usually defined as whitespace-separated tokens.
  • Words per minute (WPM) — A typing-speed metric: correct characters typed, divided by 5, divided by elapsed minutes.