Glossary

The Glossary is a searchable list of terms and their definitions, scoped to a single project. It serves two purposes: a quick reference for the invented vocabulary of your world, and the source of custom words for the editor's spell checker.

Where terms come from

Every glossary entry has a source that tells you where it originated:

• User: a term you added by hand in the Glossary view.
• World: created automatically from a World element.
• Character: created automatically from a Character (including each of their aliases).

Automatic syncing

Writers Notebook keeps the glossary in step with your characters and world so you don't have to maintain proper nouns twice:

• Creating a character or world element automatically adds its name (and, for characters, each alias) to the glossary. The definition starts empty for you to fill in.
• Renaming the source character or world element renames the matching glossary term.
• Deleting the source removes its auto-created entry, unless you've written a definition for it. In that case the entry is kept and its source is promoted to User, so your work isn't lost.
• You can manually promote any auto entry to a User entry to protect it from deletion.

Spell-check integration

Every glossary term, no matter its source, is added to the project's custom spell-check dictionary. This means all of your proper nouns and invented words are recognized by the editor and never underlined as misspellings.

Working with the glossary

The Glossary view lets you search the full list, add entries manually, and edit definitions for both hand-made and auto-created terms.

How the glossary is stored

Unlike other entities, the glossary keeps everything (terms and inline definitions) in a single file:

glossary/
  glossary.yaml            # all entries with inline definitions