Glossary

Short, plain-language definitions for the terms used across this site’s tools andLearn articles. Every entry links to the full explanation — this page is a quick answer, not the whole story.

• Acronym

  A word formed from the initial letters of a longer name or phrase, used in place of it. The problem is never the acronym itself — it’s one used before it’s ever expanded for the reader.

• Flesch Reading Ease

  A 0–100 readability score from sentence length and syllables per word. Higher means easier to read.

• Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level

  The same inputs as Flesch Reading Ease, rescaled to a US school grade level instead of a 0–100 score.

• Gendered default

  A word or example that assumes a gender where none is relevant — "he" as the default pronoun for an unspecified user, for instance.

• Gunning Fog Index

  A readability formula that estimates the years of formal education needed to understand a piece of text on first read.

• Heading hierarchy

  The nesting order of a document’s headings (H1 → H2 → H3). Skipped levels and duplicate headings are the two most common breaks in it.

• Hedging language

  Words like "somewhat," "fairly," or "it seems that" that soften a claim instead of stating it — sometimes warranted, often just a habit.

• Homoglyph

  A character that renders identically, or nearly identically, to a different character — a Cyrillic "а" standing in for a Latin "a," for example. The gap between how it looks and what it actually is can be exploited.

• Inclusive language

  Word choices that avoid unnecessarily gendered, ableist, or exclusionary framing — treated here as suggestions with alternatives, not verdicts.

• Keyword density

  The percentage of a page’s words that are a target keyword. Despite persistent advice to hit a target percentage, it is not a Google ranking factor.

• Meta description

  The short summary shown under a page’s title in search results. Google truncates it at a pixel width, not a fixed character count.

• Nominalization

  A verb turned into a noun — "make a decision" instead of "decide." Usually a sign the sentence’s real action is buried.

• Passive voice

  A sentence structure where the subject receives the action instead of performing it — "the file was deleted" rather than "I deleted the file." Not always wrong, but worth noticing.

• Plain language

  Writing chosen for clarity to the widest possible audience — including readers who didn’t learn English first — over technically-correct-but-obscure phrasing.

• Readability formula

  Any of several formulas (Flesch, Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog) that estimate how hard a text is to read from surface signals like sentence length and syllable count. Useful as a signal, not a verdict.

• Reading speed

  How many words a reader gets through per minute. Research puts the silent-reading average around 238 wpm — not the commonly cited 200 wpm, which is decades out of date.

• Sentence length

  The number of words in a sentence — a rough stand-in for how much a sentence asks of a reader’s working memory, not a hard difficulty score on its own.

• Terminology consistency

  Using the same term for the same concept throughout a document — not switching between "sign in" and "log in" for the same action.

• Throat-clearing (opener)

  A sentence-opening phrase — "it is important to note that" — that announces a point is coming without making any part of it. Deleting it loses nothing.

• Title case

  A capitalization style where most words are capitalized ("This Is Title Case"), as opposed to sentence case, where only the first word and proper nouns are.

• US vs UK spelling

  Dialect variants like "color/colour" or "organize/organise." The problem is rarely which one a document picks — it’s mixing both within the same document.

• Weasel word

  A word that hedges a claim without adding information — "many," "significantly," "virtually" — letting a sentence sound precise without committing to anything checkable.

• Word repetition

  The same word reused unusually close together, which reads as a rhythm problem even when every individual use is correct.