Non-keyword

A 'non-keyword' refers to a word or phrase that is not reserved or recognized by a specific programming language, search engine, or other system as a special term with a predefined function or meaning. Unlike keywords, which have inherent significance and are part of the system's internal vocabulary, non-keywords are treated as ordinary data or identifiers. Their interpretation relies on the context provided by the user, data, or other associated elements. Essentially, a non-keyword doesn't trigger any default action, command, or special interpretation by the system.

Non-keyword meaning with examples

• In a Python program, while 'def', 'if', and 'for' are keywords, a variable name like 'my_variable' or a string literal like 'hello world' is a non-keyword. These elements hold data or reference information and are interpreted based on the programmer's defined code logic. The same logic doesn't apply to keywords.
• When searching on a web browser, terms like 'the', 'a', and 'is' might be filtered out or given less weight by the search engine because they are considered non-keywords. However, more specific terms such as 'best pizza in town' or names, like 'Shakespeare', are treated as keywords for retrieving relevant web pages.
• Within a relational database, field names like 'customer_name' and 'product_price' are considered non-keywords. While the database structure uses keywords like 'CREATE' and 'SELECT', the fields are simply data storage placeholders and are not inherently meaningful unless within the defined schema.
• In natural language processing, words that are not stop words (common words like 'the', 'a', 'and', 'is') or that do not hold some special tokenizing position are essentially regarded as non-keywords when doing analysis of the text and for some specific machine learning purposes.