Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or process of furnishing critical commentary or explanatory notes.
  • noun A critical or explanatory note; a commentary.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of annotating or of making notes.
  • noun A remark, note, or comment on some passage of a book or other writing: as, annotations on the Scriptures.
  • noun The first symptoms of the approach of a febrile paroxysm in intermittent fever.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A note, added by way of comment, or explanation; -- usually in the plural.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun a critical or explanatory commentary or analysis
  • noun a comment added to a text
  • noun the process of writing such comment or commentary
  • noun computing metadata added to a document or program
  • noun genetics information relating to the genetic structure of sequences of bases

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a comment or instruction (usually added)
  • noun the act of adding notes

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin annotātiōnem, accusative singular of annotātiō ("remark, annotation"), from annotātus, perfect passive participle of annotō ("note down, remark").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word annotation.

Examples

  • Each 200-250 word annotation is written to give the reader a sense of the book's style and content.

    500 Great Books by Women: Summary and book reviews of 500 Great Books by Women by Erica Bauermeister. 1994

  • Finally, the most recent MISTBORN 3 annotation is for chapter 16, in which I discuss Spook's reaction to the Citizen's reign.

    Signing Tomorrow! + Alcatraz Sample Chapters mistborn 2009

  • For me annotation is the big noise and as Reader gets more fully featured comparisons between it and other aggregators is inevitable, FriendFeed por ejemplo.

    FriendFeed v. The latest Google Reader rev : #comments 2008

  • Well, one of the definitions of annotation is - "A critical or explanatory note; a commentary" - so I would argue that all blogging is annotation since everything we write is an attempt to 'explain' whether that's to explain something about the world or something that's in our head.

    Google ReWriter is on the way 2007

  • Web annotation is definitely in its infancy right now.

    Google Help : Search Features 2005

  • Web annotation is definitely in its infancy right now.

    Simon Willison: Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary 2005

  • And one of the many, many pleasures of Alfred Appel's masterly introduction and annotation is the discovery that Nabokov did not realize that Maurice Girodias and the Olympia Press were specialists in — well, shall we just say "erotica"? — when he let them have the manuscript.

    Hurricane Lolita 2005

  • And one of the many, many pleasures of Alfred Appel's masterly introduction and annotation is the discovery that Nabokov did not realize that Maurice Girodias and the Olympia Press were specialists in — well, shall we just say "erotica"? — when he let them have the manuscript.

    Hurricane Lolita 2005

  • And one of the many, many pleasures of Alfred Appel's masterly introduction and annotation is the discovery that Nabokov did not realize that Maurice Girodias and the Olympia Press were specialists in — well, shall we just say "erotica"? — when he let them have the manuscript.

    Hurricane Lolita 2005

  • That explains why the code compiles and runs even if I remove the "@Override" annotation from the code.

    DaniWeb IT Discussion Community 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.