annotated

annotated — verb

1. to write short explanations, comments, or notes on a text, drawing, or image in

1.verbtransitiveB2
Definition

to write short explanations, comments, or notes on a text, drawing, or image in order to help readers understand it better — for instance, explaining a difficult word in a poem or labelling the parts of a diagram in a textbook.

Example

Bao annotated the poem with notes about the author's life and the historical context.

annotate [text] with [explanatory notes]

The history professor asked the class to annotate each page of the old letter.

Common collocations
  • annotate a text / document / manuscript / poem
  • annotate a diagram / image / photograph
  • annotate with notes / comments / explanations
Synonyms
  • gloss

    usually means explaining a single difficult word or phrase, often between lines or in the margin

  • comment on

    less structured; can mean giving an opinion rather than explaining

  • footnote

    specifically refers to adding a note at the bottom of a page, usually with a reference number

Grammar Patterns

annotate + noun phrase + with + noun phrase

passive: be annotated

Usage Note

Often used in academic or educational contexts where a text is studied closely. The person annotating is typically adding value for future readers, not just for themselves.

Common Mistakes

I annotated the book with highlighting the important parts.
I annotated the book by adding notes in the margins.
'annotate' means adding written notes or explanations, not highlighting or underlining.
She annotated him about the meeting.
She annotated the document with comments about the budget.
The object of 'annotate' is always the text or image being explained, not a person.

2. to add labels, tags, or descriptions to digital data — such as marking whether a

2.verbtransitiveC1
Definition

to add labels, tags, or descriptions to digital data — such as marking whether a word in a text is a noun or a verb, or classifying a photo by what it shows — so that computer systems can process the information more effectively.

Example

The research team annotated over ten thousand sentences with grammatical tags.

annotate [data] with [tags / labels]

A computer program was trained to annotate product reviews by their overall tone.

Common collocations
  • annotate data / a corpus / a dataset / a collection
  • annotate with tags / labels / codes
  • annotate by hand / automatically
Synonyms
  • tag

    more general and less formal; tagging can be automated or manual and is often simpler (e.g. a single keyword)

  • label

    similar to tag but often implies a category name rather than a structured description

  • mark up

    can mean adding codes or symbols to a text or dataset, common in XML/HTML contexts

Grammar Patterns

annotate + noun phrase + with + noun phrase

Usage Note

Common in technical fields such as computational linguistics, machine learning, and corpus research. The passive form is very frequent because the process is often described from the data's perspective (e.g. 'the corpus was annotated for part-of-speech tags').

Common Mistakes

We annotated the data with tagging each image.
We annotated the data by tagging each image.
The tool/instrument is introduced with 'with' + noun phrase, not 'with' + gerund.
He annotated the database at SQL.
He annotated the database with SQL queries.
The annotation method or label type follows 'with', not 'at'.

annotated — adjective

Word family

Synonym discussion

Sense: verb/1

'Annotate' is the broadest term: it means adding any kind of explanatory note — from a brief marginal comment to a detailed scholarly footnote — to a text or image, usually to make the material more understandable for readers. 'Gloss' is narrower: it refers to explaining a single difficult word or phrase, often placed between the lines or in the margin (as in a glossed medieval manuscript). 'Comment on' is less systematic and can simply mean giving an opinion without physically writing on the page. 'Footnote' is the most specific: it means adding a numbered note at the bottom of a page, normally with a superscript reference in the main text. In practice, a scholar might annotate a document by glossing unfamiliar terms and footnoting sources. When choosing which word to use, consider whether you are talking about the general act (annotate), explaining a tricky word (gloss), offering a reaction (comment on), or citing a source (footnote).

annotate ↗glosscomment onfootnote

Common collocations

Nouns

Adverbs

Phrases

  • annotated bibliography
  • annotated edition
  • annotated version
  • annotated transcript

Prepositions

Etymology

LatinEnglish

The word 'annotate' comes from Latin 'annotatus', the past participle of 'annotare', which means 'to mark down' or 'to note'. It is formed from 'ad-' (meaning 'to' or 'towards') and 'notare' (meaning 'to mark' or 'to note', from 'nota' meaning 'a mark or sign'). English borrowed the word through scholarly Latin in the 1700s, initially used in the context of biblical and classical text criticism. The adjective 'annotated' followed naturally as a way to describe editions that had been furnished with explanatory notes.