Termofile

Termofile is a lightweight plain-text data format used to store terminology resources such as glossaries, term banks, and controlled vocabularies. It is designed to be human-readable and editable with a basic text editor, requiring minimal tooling to create or update entries.

An entry in a termofile consists of fields such as term, part of speech, definition, examples, and synonyms. Fields are separated by a delimiter (commonly a tab or vertical bar). Lines starting with # are treated as comments and ignored by parsers. Optional metadata can be included at the top, such as language or domain.

Termofiles are used by glossary managers, localization workflows, search indexes, and natural language processing pipelines to provide consistent terminology across documents and software. They support interactively editing terms, importing from other formats, and exporting to formats such as JSON or YAML.

Because termofile is not a formal standard, implementations vary. Some projects define stricter field orders or enforce validation rules, while others rely on flexible parsing. The format emphasizes simplicity and portability, making it suitable for lightweight projects where a full database or structured interchange format would be overkill.