For other uses of the term Gloss, see Gloss (disambiguation).

A gloss (from Koine Greek γλώσσα glossa, meaning 'tongue') is a note made in the margins or between the lines of a book, in which the meaning of the text in its original language is explained, sometimes in another language. As such, glosses can vary in thoroughness and complexity, from simple marginal notations of words one reader found difficult or obscure, to entire interlinear translations of the original text and cross references to similar passages.

A collection of glosses is a glossary (though glossary also means simply a collection of specialized terms with their meanings). A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by so called glossators, commenting legal texts, is called an apparatus. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries.

In theology

Glosses were a primary format used in medieval Biblical theology, and were studied and memorized almost upon their own merit, without regards to the author. Many times a Biblical passage was heavily associated with a particular gloss, whose truth was taken for granted by many theologians. This phenomenon occurred also in medieval law: the glosses on Roman law and Canon law created for many subjects standard starting points of reference, a socalled sedes materiae (literally: seat of the matter).

In philology

Glosses are of some importance in philology, especially if one language—usually, the language of the author of the gloss—has left few texts of its own. The Reichenau glosses, for example, gloss the Latin Vulgate Bible in an early form of one of the Romance languages, and as such give insight into late Vulgar Latin at a time when that language was not often written down. A series of glosses in the Old English language to Latin Bibles give us a running translation of Biblical texts in that language; see Old English Bible translations. Glosses of Christian religious texts are also important for our knowledge of Old Irish. Glosses frequently shed valuable light on the vocabulary of otherwise little attested languages; they are less reliable for syntax, because many times the glosses follow the word order of the original text, and translate its idioms literally.

In linguistics

In linguistics, a simple gloss in running text is usually indicated in single quotation marks, following the transcription of a foreign word. For example:

• A Cossack longboat is called a chaika ‘seagull’.
• The moose gains its name from the Algonquian mus or mooz (‘twig eater’).

A longer or more complex transcription requires an interlinear gloss. This is often placed between a text and its translation when it is important to understand the structure of the language being glossed. It has become standard to align the words and to gloss each morpheme separately. Grammatical terms are commonly abbreviated and printed in SMALL CAPITALS to keep them distinct from translations. Varying levels of analysis may be detailed. For example,

Lezgian (Haspelmath 1993: 207)

Gila	abur-u-n	ferma	hamišaluǧ	güǧüna	amuqʼ-da-č
now	they-OBL-GEN	farm	forever	behind	stay-FUT-NEG

or

Gila	aburun	ferma	hamišaluǧ	güǧüna	amuqʼ-da-č
now	their.OBL	farm	forever	behind	stay-will-not

or

Gila	aburun	ferma	hamišaluǧ	güǧüna	amuqʼdač
now	their	farm	forever	behind	won't.stay

Now their farm will not stay behind forever.

A semi-standardized set of parsing conventions and grammatical abbreviations is contained in the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

In sociology

Talcott Parsons used the word "gloss" to describe how mind constructs reality. We are taught how to "put the world together" by others who subscribe to a consensus reality — which many disciplines, Zen for example, strive to overcome. Studies have shown that our brains "filter" the data coming from our senses. This "filtering" is largely unconsciously created and determined by biology, cultural constructs including language, personal experience, belief systems, etcetera. Different cultures create different glosses.

Generally Loquacious Overly Simplistic marketing Speak, is a term used often in conjunction with COTS, commercial-off-the-shelf software. Loquacious is defined by dictionary.com as "adj: full of trivial conversation". It usually refers to extravagant claims found on vendors' web sites that promise their software will be capable of supporting many features and standards that other commercial packages do not. The reason for this is that large vendors compete against each other for very large contracts with which to fund their continued production of GLOSS.

Observers note that the amount of GLOSS featured on a vendor web site often has a direct inverse relationship to the amount of useful and freely available API documentation or end-user documentation. This is often done to make the vendor site appeal to non-technical people who would not necessarily know what to look for when it comes to technical documentation.

One problem often found in many packages touting much GLOSS is that they don't feature the basic information system design principle of "loose coupling". This is a fancy word that boils down to the ability for a given system to exchange data with another system without having to know very much about the internal details of that other system. For example, a properly-design, loosely-coupled system would be able to easily export its data, possibly as XML, so that another system would be able to use that information without having to care what programming language or database design that other system has on the inside.

The reason that many packages featuring GLOSS do not feature loose coupling is that they often are produced by large organizations to serve large in-house enterprise needs. Unfortunately, this approach does not often take into consideration existing or emerging information exchange standards, and leads to a product that may suit the needs of the original organization very well, but since it is not well-factored, it does not scale well when implanted into other organizations without requiring extensive modifications to existing business processes and operations models.

By comparison, GLOSS is not found quite as often on web sites that feature free software programs. Instead such sites often feature much documentation, both technical and often end-user directed. Such sites tend to focus on what the software package actually can do, but do not claim that it can do more than it is designed to do. To be fair, these sites may not always have as much coordinated end-user documentation as would be necessary to successfully use the software. In addition, it does take a degree of technical-savvy and experience to properly evaluate the applicability of any given software package by considering all of its facets, especially regarding extensibility and usability.

Related terms

GLOSS is not quite the same as Vaporware, in that GLOSS may describe software that actually does exist, but does not live up to the claims of the marketing.