palavraschave

Palavraschave is a term used to refer to keywords in Portuguese. In standard orthography, the term is written as palavras-chave (singular: palavra-chave; plural: palavras-chave). The concatenated form palavraschave does not follow standard spelling, but may appear in contexts where spaces or hyphens are impractical, such as in filenames, URLs, or certain programming identifiers.

Etymology and meaning: The term combines palavra (word) and chave (key), conveying the idea of a word that unlocks the content or topic of a document. In information science, keywords are the terms that best represent the subject matter and facilitate indexing, search, and retrieval.

Usage: Keywords are used to summarize and tag content so it can be found more easily in databases, catalogs, and search engines. In metadata and search engine optimization (SEO), the selection of palavras-chave influences visibility and relevance to user queries. Best practices include choosing terms that accurately reflect the content, cover the main topics, and anticipate user search behavior; using both singular and plural forms when appropriate; avoiding overly generic terms and duplicate keywords.

Variant forms and related terms: The preferred form in formal writing remains palavras-chave. Palavraschave may appear in technical contexts such as programming, branding, or as a domain or file name where nonstandard spellings are tolerated or required. Related concepts include metadata, tags, indexing, and topic modeling.

See also: Keywords; Metadata; SEO; Information retrieval.