Definitions - Best Practices
- Vicki McEwen
- Steven Murawski
Adding Definitions from Established Sources
The majority of terms that we add to the Compliance Dictionary come from established sources and will thus already be defined. In most cases if a term is not defined in the Authority Document you will be able to find a dictionary entry somewhere online or offline. For single words you will likely find good definitions from any of the online dictionaries such as Dictionary.com and the Oxford English Dictionary
With regard to technical terms and phrases it might not be quite as easy to find sources, but there are a broad range of technical dictionaries online, so in most cases you will still be able to find what you’re looking for. If you exhaust all of the below sources you can also look to technical organizations for help. NIST for instance has its own comprehensive online glossary of technical terms, which can be found here.
As a last resort, if searching the above sources still doesn’t yield results you sometimes can use some creative search bar wizardry to find some of the more elusive definitions. You can play with the search filters to broaden or narrow your search, or you can search phrases such as ‘define “________” is’, or ‘“_____________” definition'. When doing this it is important to type the specific phrase that you are looking for in quotes to ensure that your results only reflect the phrase in question or you will be buried by a mountain of results that include any mix of the words within the phrase and in any order.
In most cases you will be able to find a satisfactory definition, or at least the information necessary to create one, in the Authority Document. Although term definitions are most often found in glossaries there are many instances when terms are defined somewhere within the document. If there is no glossary, look at each section of the document. There may be a formal section for terms and definitions, as illustrated below.
If neither a glossary nor a section for terms and definitions exist all hope is not lost! You will often find passages that either clarify what the author means when they use a particular term or a sub-section that specifies what a term means in the context of the document or section thereof such as in the example below.