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WPBeginner» Blog» Plugins» How to Add a Glossary or Dictionary Section in Your WordPress Site

How to Add a Glossary or Dictionary Section in Your WordPress Site

Last updated on October 15th, 2018 by Editorial Staff
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How to Add a Glossary or Dictionary Section in Your WordPress Site

Do you want to add a glossary or dictionary section in your WordPress site? A glossary section has all the terms and abbreviations related to your business, so you can easily explain industry topics to your customers. This helps you earn trust and position yourself as an industry leader. In this article, we will show you how to add a glossary or dictionary section to your WordPress site.

Adding a glossary in WordPress

What is a Glossary or Dictionary?

A glossary or dictionary has definitions of terms listed in the alphabetical order on a specific subject. It shows keyword and explanation like a general dictionary which helps users find the meaning of a specific term, phrase, or abbreviation.

You can refer to WPBeginner’s WordPress Glossary to get an idea of how a typical glossary or dictionary looks like.

WordPress glossary

With that said, let’s take a look on how to easily add a glossary or dictionary section on your WordPress site.

Video Tutorial

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If you don’t want to watch the video tutorial, then you can continue reading the text version below:

Adding a Glossary or Dictionary on your WordPress Site

The first thing you need to do is to install and activate the CM Tooltip Glossary plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll be automatically redirected to the plugin’s settings page.

Under the ‘General Settings’ tab, you can select a page to display glossary terms, set glossary page URL, and manage the highlighting options for glossary terms. You can also enable the case sensitive option for your glossary.

Glossary settings

If your site doesn’t have a glossary page, then you can enable the ‘Generate Page for Glossary Index’ option to create a new page for your glossary. By default, the glossary page URL will be ‘yoursite.com/glossary’.

If you change the glossary permalink settings on this page, then you can use your new slug (keyword) to view the glossary page.

Once you are done, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store these settings.

Next, you need to visit the ‘Glossary Index Page’ tab to configure your glossary display settings.

Each option has a question mark icon next to it. You can hover on this icon to see what each specific option does.

Index page settings

After that, you need to switch to the ‘Glossary Term’ tab to manage link settings for your glossary. You have the option to ‘Open glossary term page in a new window/tab’. While we don’t think it creates a good user experience, you can choose the settings that best fits your need.

Glossary term settings

Adding a New Glossary Term

Now that you have configured glossary settings, you are ready to start adding glossary terms and their definition.

Simply go to CM Tooltip Glossary » Add New page in your WordPress admin area to add a new glossary term.

First, you need to provide a title for your glossary term and then write the description in the text editor. Once you’re done writing the details, click on the ‘Publish’ button.

Add new glossary term

You can add as many glossary terms as you want, and they’ll be automatically arranged in the alphabetical order on your glossary page. It also allows you to start the glossary term title with numbers and display them before the alphabetical terms on the glossary page.

After adding a few terms, you can visit your WordPress site to see the glossary page in action.

Note: The glossary / dictionary page URL is the same that you created in the general settings above.

Glossary page

If you have hundreds of glossary terms, then your users can click on any alphabet or numerical value above to easily view the specific terms on the dictionary page.

That’s all. We hope this article helped you learn how to add a glossary or dictionary on your WordPress site. You may also want to see our ultimate step by step guide on how to start a WordPress blog for beginners.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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16 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Bello says:
    Sep 16, 2020 at 1:58 am

    Hello, is there a possibility different dictionaries for each page?

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Sep 16, 2020 at 1:43 pm

      You would want to check with the plugin’s support with what you’re wanting to do as that has a bit of a niche use case.

      Reply
  2. Gigi says:
    Jun 25, 2020 at 11:46 pm

    Hi, thanks for your post, is very useful. I have a question, I want to have different dictionaries, is that possible? Thank you lots

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Jun 26, 2020 at 9:08 am

      The pro version allows multiple glossaries for what you’re wanting.

      Reply
  3. Jenna says:
    Jul 14, 2019 at 9:50 pm

    I want to create a glossary on my site, but was going to use anchors and accordions. Is it beneficial for SEO or UX to have the entries on separate pages, rather than keeping it all on one page? Thanks in advance.

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Jul 15, 2019 at 12:41 pm

      Depending on how much content you have it may be easier for your visitors to navigate the multiple pages but set up well there shouldn’t be much of a difference.

      Reply
  4. ahmed says:
    Jun 28, 2019 at 10:56 pm

    what kind of plugin you use in your site, I thing is just category and sub. a to z is it write

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Jul 1, 2019 at 12:50 pm

      Ours is a custom design we did for our site rather than a specific plugin.

      Reply
  5. Godwin says:
    May 2, 2019 at 12:08 pm

    Hi, after creating the glossary using CM tooltip, can anyone give me an idea how I can convert my site to an offline app? Pls help me out

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      May 3, 2019 at 10:27 am

      Unless I hear otherwise, that would require significant work to turn your site into an offline app, for making it an app, in general, you could take a look at our article here:
      https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-plugins-to-convert-wordpress-into-mobile-app/

      Reply
  6. Damith says:
    Sep 27, 2018 at 2:38 am

    I have no idea why big brand like wpbeginner promote plugins like CM Tooltip Glossary which is already delete from WordPress officially directory. This isn’t good.

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Oct 2, 2018 at 7:48 pm

      Hi Damith,

      The plugin authors released an updated version which is now fully compatible with wp.org plugin guidelines.

      Reply
  7. Jonathan Polley says:
    Sep 26, 2018 at 2:22 pm

    Just so you know, the plugin you recommend in this article is closed and no longer available for download.

    Rendering this article useless (not your fault) are there other glossary plugins with the same functionality?

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Oct 2, 2018 at 8:16 pm

      Hi Jonathan,

      The plugin is back live.

      Reply
      • Jonathan Polley says:
        Oct 4, 2018 at 7:17 am

        Great,

        Thank you!

        Reply
  8. manish says:
    Sep 24, 2018 at 8:30 pm

    hi,

    this is some very nice information.
    Thanx.

    Reply

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