Tekstas

Tekstas is a Lithuanian noun meaning "text." It refers to a coherent written or printed discourse, or more broadly to a sequence of characters stored or transmitted in a digital format. In everyday use, tekstas denotes the body of written content within a document, article, or book, and is distinguished from layout, images, or data.

Etymology and cognates: Tekstas derives from Latin textus, meaning "weave, fabric," via French texte and other European languages. The term reflects the historical view of a text as a woven composition of words and sentences.

Linguistic and textual use: In linguistics and literary studies, a text is a cohesive unit of discourse that can be analyzed for structure, style, and meaning. Texts are categorized by function, such as narrative, expository, descriptive, or procedural. Key components include sentences, paragraphs, and discourse markers; cohesion and coherence are central concerns in textual analysis.

Computing and digital usage: In computing, tekstas refers to the string of characters encoded in a character set. Text processing encompasses editing, searching, formatting, and encoding. In programming, text is handled as strings and stored in files or databases. Plain text has no markup, whereas markup languages like HTML annotate structure and presentation.

Applications and contexts: Tekstas appears in education, journalism, law, and software localization as a standard unit of written information. Its treatment varies by discipline—from aesthetic and rhetorical analysis to technical and computational processing—yet remains a core element of communication and information management.