Stop words are words that a computer system will ignore in the free-text searching of a document or building of an index. Stop words are those that have no real meaning. The twelve most-commonly used stop words are: a, an, and, by, for, from, in, of, on, the, to, with.
Different disciplines might employ different sets of stop words. For example, a health and nutrition database might not use "a" as a stop word so that it wouldn't eliminate "vitamin a" as an index term.
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