Technical term

How it is used

Used when explaining specialist vocabulary in research papers, textbooks, lectures, and public-facing summaries for mixed audiences.

Example sentences

1. The supervisor told me to define every technical term the first time it appeared because the thesis would be read across departments.

   Here it means discipline-specific vocabulary that could confuse non-specialist readers unless the writer explains it clearly at first mention.

2. In the glossary, she replaced several everyday paraphrases with the correct technical term used in corpus linguistics.

   In this example, it refers to the exact specialist label preferred by the field instead of broader or less precise everyday wording.

Common collocations

• define a technical term
• use a technical term
• specialist technical term

Related terms

• conceptA general idea or principle, especially one that is defined and used in a particular theory or field of study.
• paraphraseTo express an author's idea in your own words and sentence structure while keeping the original meaning; the source still needs a citation.

More terms: Academic Vocabulary

• indicate
• e.g.
• i.e.
• approach
• implication
• demonstrate
• furthermore
• assumption
• phenomenon
• comprise
• respectively
• however