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Text is symbolic information composed of characters that convey language in written form. It includes prose, poetry, dialogue, code, and data descriptions, and it serves as a primary medium for communication, knowledge recording, and cultural expression in both print and digital environments.

The word text derives from the Latin textus, meaning woven or fabric. In contemporary use, it denotes the visible or printable content that can be displayed, printed, or transmitted. Text is stored and exchanged as sequences of characters encoded according to standards such as ASCII and Unicode. Unicode provides a comprehensive set of code points that enables text in many scripts to be represented consistently across devices and platforms.

In computing, text is processed through steps such as normalization, tokenization, stemming or lemmatization, and parsing. Normalization may involve case folding, removing diacritics, or standardizing representations. Tokenization splits text into units like words, numbers, and punctuation. These steps enable tasks such as search, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and other natural language processing applications.

Beyond content, text has typographic and layout aspects including font, kerning, line length, and alignment, which affect readability and aesthetics. Digital text is scalable and searchable, while printed text has a fixed layout. Text encoding and font support influence accessibility, including handling of right-to-left and complex scripts.

Text underpins programming languages, markup and documentation, databases, and content management. It is central to information retrieval, digital humanities, and educational technology. Text data can be unstructured or structured, as in labeled annotations or metadata.

Historically, text evolved from inscriptions and manuscripts to the printed book and digital text, driven by writing systems, printing technologies, and computer encoding. The internet has made text a fundamental, machine-readable medium across languages and contexts.