annotate

annotate — verb

1. to write short notes beside a piece of writing or an image, usually to explain s

1.verbtransitiveC1
Definition

to write short notes beside a piece of writing or an image, usually to explain something difficult, give your opinion, or point out important parts.

Example

Professor Lin asked her students to annotate the poem before Friday's class.

annotate + noun (text)

Kofi annotated his chemistry textbook with colorful sticky notes and tiny drawings.

annotate + noun + with + noun

Common collocations
  • annotate a text
  • annotate a poem
  • heavily annotated
  • annotate the margins
Synonyms
  • gloss

    more formal and academic; usually means explaining individual words

  • comment on

    broader; can be spoken or written, no requirement to write beside the text

  • mark up

    informal; suggests editing marks rather than explanatory notes

Grammar Patterns

annotate + noun

annotate + noun + with + noun

Usage Note

Object is typically a written or visual work (poem, map, photograph, manuscript). Often passive when the focus is the result rather than who did the work, as in 'the document is annotated'.

Common Mistakes

I annotated about the painting in my notebook.
I wrote notes about the painting in my notebook.
'annotate' takes a direct object (the thing receiving the notes), not 'about'.
She annotated me the difficult words.
She annotated the difficult words for me.
'annotate' does not take a person as indirect object.

2. in computing or research, to attach small labels or descriptions to items in a d

2.verbtransitiveC1
Definition

in computing or research, to attach small labels or descriptions to items in a dataset so software or people can recognize them — for example, marking each word in a sentence as a noun, verb, or place name.

Example

The team paid students to annotate thousands of dog photos for a new image-recognition app.

annotate + noun (data)

Linguists annotated each sentence with grammar labels before training the language model.

annotate + noun + with + noun (label set)

Common collocations
  • annotate a dataset
  • annotate images
  • manually annotate
  • annotate with labels
Synonyms
  • label

    everyday equivalent; less technical-sounding

  • tag

    common in computing; usually for shorter or single-word labels

Grammar Patterns

annotate + noun

annotate + noun + with + noun

Usage Note

Distinguish from sense 1: this sense applies to structured data (datasets, audio clips, scans, sentences) and the labels follow a fixed system, not free comments. Common in machine-learning and linguistics contexts.

Common Mistakes

They annotated the data with their thoughts about it.
They annotated the data with category labels.
sense 2 uses fixed labels, not personal opinions.

Word family

Synonym discussion

Sense: verb/1

All four verbs describe adding written remarks to a text, but they differ in scope and feel. 'Annotate' is the most academic and usually means writing short, structured notes beside a passage to explain or interpret it — a teacher annotates a poem for her class. 'Gloss' is narrower and more scholarly: it specifically means explaining a single word or phrase, often a foreign or old one, with a brief definition. 'Comment' is the broadest; it can be spoken or written, and it expresses an opinion rather than guiding a reader through a text. 'Mark up' is the most informal and physical — it suggests covering a draft with edits, corrections, or proofreading symbols. So you annotate a Shakespeare play, gloss an Old English word, comment on a friend's essay, and mark up a contract before sending it back.

annotate ↗glosscomment ↗mark up

Common collocations

Nouns

Adverbs

Phrases

  • heavily annotated edition
  • annotated by hand

Prepositions

Etymology

LatinEnglish

Comes from the Latin verb 'annotare', built from 'ad-' meaning 'to' and 'notare' meaning 'to mark or note'. It entered English in the early 1600s, first used by scholars who wrote explanatory notes in the margins of books. The modern computing sense — labelling data for machines — only became common in the late 20th century as research on language and image processing grew.