DITA Resource Center

glossterm

The <glossterm> element specifies the preferred term associated with a definition of a sense. If the same term has multiple senses, create a separate <glossentry> topic for each sense.

Contains

note

These models represent only the default document types distributed by OASIS. Actual content models will differ with each new document type.
Doctype Content model
ditabase, glossary, glossentry, glossgroup ( text data or boolean or keyword or apiname or option or parmname or cmdname or msgnum or varname or wintitle or ph or b or i or sup or sub or tt or u or codeph or synph or filepath or msgph or systemoutput or userinput or menucascade or uicontrol or q or term or abbreviated-form or tm or state or data or data-about or foreign or unknown or image) (any number)

Contained by

Doctype Content model
ditabase, glossary, glossentry, glossgroup glossentry

Inheritance

- topic/title concept/title glossentry/glossterm

Example

The glossary term "USB flash drive" with additional information

<glossentry id="usbfd">
  <glossterm>USB flash drive</glossterm>
  <glossdef>A small portable drive.</glossdef>
  <glossBody>
    <glossPartOfSpeech value="noun"/>
    <glossUsage>Do not provide in upper case (as in "USB Flash
Drive") because that suggests a trademark.</glossUsage>
    <glossAlt>
      <glossAcronym>UFD</glossAcronym>
      <glossUsage>Explain the acronym on first occurrence.</glossUsage>
    </glossAlt>
    <glossAlt id="memoryStick">
      <glossSynonym>memory stick</glossSynonym>
      <glossUsage>This is a colloquial term.</glossUsage>
    </glossAlt>
    <glossAlt>
      <glossAbbreviation>stick</glossAbbreviation>
      <glossStatus value="prohibited"/>
      <glossUsage>This is too colloquial.</glossUsage>
      <glossAlternateFor href="#usbfd/memoryStick"/>
    </glossAlt>
    <glossAlt>
      <glossAbbreviation>flash</glossAbbreviation>
      <glossStatus value="prohibited"/>
      <glossUsage>This short form is ambiguous.</glossUsage>
    </glossAlt>
  </glossBody>
</glossentry>

Attributes

Name Description Data Type Default Value Required?
base A generic attribute that has no specific purpose. It is intended to act as a base for specialized attributes that have a simple value syntax like the conditional processing attributes (one or more alphanumeric values separated by whitespace), but is not itself a filtering or flagging attribute. The attribute takes a space-delimited set of values. However, when acting as a container for generalized attributes, the content model will be more complex; see Attribute generalization for more details. CDATA #IMPLIED No
id-atts attribute group (id, conref, conrefend, conaction, conkeyref) A set of related attributes, described in id-atts attribute group
localization-atts attribute group (translate, xml:lang, dir) A set of related attributes, described in localization-atts attribute group.
global-atts attribute group (xtrf, xtrc) A set of related attributes, described in global-atts attribute group
class, outputclass Common attributes described in Other common DITA attributes

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