Word Processing Vocabulary
1. Style – a collection of formatting settings, such as font, size, color, and other attributes applied to
text or paragraphs.
2. Thesaurus – a feature which can find synonyms for words.
3. Find and Replace – feature which can find a word and then replace it with another word.
4. Comments – a feature which allows readers to offer advice or other thoughts without changing the
content of a document.
5. Page Break – a feature that will force the cursor onto the next page.
a. Hard Page Break – manual
b. Soft Page Break – automatic
6. Section Break – a feature that will allow you to control page formatting for a particular part of the
document.
7. Continuous Section Break - A type of section break that does not create a page break.
8. Superscript - Small text found above the baseline, such as the “st” in 1st
9. Subscript - Small text found below the baseline, such as the “2” in H2O
10. Baseline - The invisible line on which normally sized letters rest.
11. Footnote – The small text at the bottom of a page which gives more information about a citation.
12. Citation – The superscripted number within the page text that indicates a footnote or endnote.
13. Endnote - A list of footnotes that appears at the end of the document.
14. Automatic Page Numbering – A feature that inserts the page number automatically.
15. Widow – Occurs when the last line of a paragraph follows a page or column break, so that the line
appears by itself at the top of a new page or column. (The opposite of an Orphan.)
16. Orphan – Occurs when the first line of a paragraph appears at the bottom of a page or column, with
the rest of the paragraph appearing on the following page or column. (The opposite of a Widow.)
17. Keep Together – A feature that can keep blocks of text together within the same page or column.
18. Newspaper columns – justified columns of text, similar to newspaper print.
19. Gutter – the white space in between columns.
20. Landscape orientation – A horizontally (sideways) oriented page.
21. Portrait orientation – A vertically (up and down) oriented page.
22. Three-panel brochure – a brochure that contains 3 equal columns (a trifold).
23. Column break – used to manually force text or pictures onto a new column.
24. Mail Merge – A feature that enables a user to create the appearance of a personalized letter by
creating a main document and a data source, and combining them.
25. Main Document – holds the text common to all copies of the document.
26. Data Source – the file (or source location) that holds the information that will be combined with the
main document to create personalized copies.
27. Record – a set of data that pertains to one recipient. (Such as “John”)
28. Field – Typically used for category names used in column headings. (Such as “First Name”)
29. Query/Filter - A function used to select only records that meet certain criteria.
30. Hyphen - Used to split a word and move part of it to the next line to increase the length of the line
so that the right side of the paragraph looks more aligned.
31. Automatic Hyphenation - A feature used to automatically insert hyphens throughout each paragraph
in the document automatically.
32. Protection - A feature used to prevent users from certain actions with a document, such as opening
the document, or editing text within the document.
33. Exception - A rule that allows users to bypass certain protection restrictions.
34. Header - Appears at the top of the page. Contains information such as the document’s title, subject,
author, date printed, and so on.
35. Footer - Appears at the bottom of the page. Contains information such as the chapter and/or page
numbers.