placeholder

noun

place·​hold·​er ˈplās-ˌhōl-dər 

plural placeholders

1

: a person or thing that occupies the position or place of another person or thing

The bill would empower the governor to appoint a placeholder to a vacant U.S. Senate seat, to serve through the next general election cycle.

—John Sharp

The result was that the legislation represented little more than a placeholder to put the budget before a conference committee …

—Carl Ingram

2

: a symbol in a mathematical or logical expression that may be replaced by the name of any element of a set

3

American football : a player who places and holds the ball upright on the ground for placekicking of a field goal

Examples of placeholder in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The screenwriter remembers helping out the crew during the ADR process by doing a Schwarzenegger impression as placeholders for a number of lines before the star could record the actual versions. —Ryan Gajewski, HollywoodReporter, 7 Nov. 2025

Dark energy was introduced as a placeholder force to explain this accelerating expansion. —Robert Lea, Space.com, 6 Nov. 2025

Flacco was signed in the offseason to be an experienced placeholder while Cleveland evaluated its pair of rookie quarterbacks. —Andrew Greif, NBC news, 17 Oct. 2025

Instead, they were told the $100,000 allocation to the rodeo in their 2024-25 promotional budget was just a placeholder and that Clodfelter had pledged to find the funds elsewhere if CountryFest ever needed the money. —Douglas Hanks, Miami Herald, 17 Oct. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1927, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for placeholder

• officeholder
• beholder
• bondholder
• cardholder
• freeholder
• householder
• landholder
• leaseholder
• lienholder
• shareholder
• slaveholder
• smallholder

Kids Definition

placeholder

noun

place·​hold·​er ˈplās-ˌhōl-dər 

: a symbol used in mathematics in the place of a numeral not yet known