Annotated

Annotated is an adjective describing something that has been supplied with notes, explanations, or critical commentary. The term comes from annotation, the act of adding explanatory material to a text, image, or data set to clarify meaning, provide context, or cite sources.

In literature and scholarly editing, an annotated edition presents the original text with accompanying notes, glosses, introductions, and cross-references. These annotations help readers understand archaic language, historical context, cultural references, and scholarly debates surrounding the work. Annotated editions are common for classical texts, religious writings, and historical documents, and they often accompany scholarly apparatus such as bibliographies and indices. An annotated bibliography is a related form in which each cited work is summarized and evaluated, offering guidance on relevance and quality.

In linguistics and natural language processing, annotated data refer to corpora where segments of text are labeled with linguistic information, such as part-of-speech tags, syntactic structure, named entities, or semantic roles. Such annotation supports research, model training, and evaluation in language technologies and corpus linguistics.

In computing and information science, annotations are metadata attached to code, documents, or data to convey additional information. In programming, languages like Java use annotations (attributes) to influence compilation, runtime behavior, or tooling. In data formats and markup languages, annotations can annotate elements for processing, validation, or documentation. Type hints and docstrings in some languages function as forms of annotation to aid developers and tools.

There is no single entity universally known as “Annotated.” The term is widely used across disciplines to denote the presence of explanatory notes rather than to designate a specific organization or product. See also annotation, annotated edition, and annotated bibliography.