annotate

verb

an·​no·​tate ˈa-nə-ˌtāt How to pronounce annotate (audio)
annotated; annotating

intransitive verb

: to make or furnish critical or explanatory notes or comment

transitive verb

: to make or furnish annotations (see annotation sense 1) for (something, such as a literary work or subject)
annotated his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy
annotative adjective
annotator noun

Examples of annotate in a Sentence

He annotated the text at several places.
Recent Examples on the Web In a recent appearance on The Hill’s Rising show, Sacks offered an argument, dutifully annotated by his chroniclers at RealClearPolitics, that Ukraine’s war is already lost, and that the sooner its Western benefactors acknowledge that fact, the better. Noah Rothman, National Review, 14 Nov. 2023 That model is trained further using code that GitHub stores for developers, as well as, reportedly, by contractors who are paid to annotate their own code. Will Knight, WIRED, 24 Aug. 2023 Machine-learning engineers have long relied on crowd-work platforms, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to annotate their models’ training data or to review output. Rahul Rao, Scientific American, 28 July 2023 Advertisement California Inside the room: The entire L.A. City Council racist audio leak, annotated by our experts Nov. 21, 2022 As was the case for some of the people on that tape, my first language was Spanish. Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, 11 Oct. 2023 David Rand, the study’s lead researcher and a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says that while around 80 percent of the tweets that users chose to annotate were, in fact, misleading, users overwhelmingly tended to prioritize political content. WIRED, 17 Oct. 2023 Data labeling, the tedious task of annotating data with labels and context so machine learning models can learn from it, is getting the side hustle treatment on TikTok. Bysage Lazzaro, Fortune, 3 Oct. 2023 As a student annotates a book for study, the faithful mark up their copies of Scripture, noting passages that speak to them. Nicholas Tomaino, WSJ, 14 Sep. 2023 Soon after Musk made the claim, users annotated his post via the platform’s Community Notes feature and included links to Apple and Google’s app-store guidelines, alleging Musk cannot eliminate the account-blocking feature without running afoul of the rules (see below). Todd Spangler, Variety, 19 Aug. 2023 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'annotate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Etymology

Latin annotatus, past participle of annotare, from ad- + notare to mark — more at note

First Known Use

1693, in the meaning defined at transitive sense

Time Traveler
The first known use of annotate was in 1693

Dictionary Entries Near annotate

Cite this Entry

“Annotate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/annotate. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.

Kids Definition

annotate

verb
an·​no·​tate ˈan-ə-ˌtāt How to pronounce annotate (audio)
annotated; annotating
: to make or add explanatory notes
annotator noun

Legal Definition

annotate

verb
an·​no·​tate ˈa-nə-ˌtāt How to pronounce annotate (audio)
annotated; annotating

intransitive verb

: to make or write an annotation

transitive verb

: to make or write annotations for
annotator noun
Last Updated: - Updated example sentences
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