Glossary Tooltip – Highlight Terms & Show Tooltips

💬 Tooltips

• Responsive behavior — definitions appear on hover on desktop and on tap on mobile, with a configurable mobile breakpoint.
• Position and placement — place the tooltip above, below, left, or right of the term, with a fine position offset.
• Styling — choose a built-in style (Classic, Light, Dark, Minimal, Shadow) or override any style with your own text, background, and border colors.
• Sizing — set the tooltip font size, border width, border radius, and padding to match your design.
• Excerpt length — control how many words of the definition appear, based on the term’s excerpt or content.
• Accessible — tooltips work with the keyboard (focus shows them, Esc closes them) and respect reduced-motion preferences.

📚 A–Z glossary index

• Full index page — display every term alphabetically via the [glossary-list] shortcode.
• Alphabetical navigation — jump straight to a letter; digits and symbols group into 0–9 and special-character sections.
• Search — a search box lets visitors filter terms as they type.
• Categories — show terms from one or several categories in a single index.
• Nested categories — include child categories automatically so sub-category terms appear in the index too. A category filter bar and a category-tree view are available with Premium.
• Sorting and layout — sort by name, date, custom order, or randomly; choose ascending or descending; show or hide letter headings; cap the number of terms per letter; and arrange terms in 1–6 columns.

🔗 Related terms

On each glossary term page, an optional “Related Terms” box lists other terms that share a category, giving visitors a natural way to keep exploring.

🗨️ Comments & feeds

• Comments on terms — let visitors comment on glossary term pages.
• Disable glossary terms feed — turn off the RSS feed for glossary term pages (both the feed URL and its link).
• Comments feed toggle — independently disable just the comments feed of a term, separate from the comments section.

🎯 Parsing control

• Exclusions — skip headings, skip text already inside links, and exclude specific HTML tags from parsing.
• Section exclusions — wrap any part of a post with [glossary-exclude]...[/glossary-exclude] to leave it untouched, or place a single marker to skip everything after it.
• Selective highlighting — with [glossary_parse] , highlight just the block of content you choose.
• Term blacklist — never highlight terms from selected categories (a global “never highlight” list in the settings), handy for keeping automatic linking off certain parts of your glossary.
• Accent-aware matching — terms with accented or non-ASCII characters are matched correctly, with optional case-sensitive matching.

⚡ Performance

• Content caching — store parsed output so repeat views are served without re-parsing.
• Smart skipping — content with no matching terms is left untouched, so empty pages parse almost instantly.
• Asset delivery — load scripts in the footer and inline assets to reduce render-blocking requests.
• Main-query control — optionally limit parsing to the main article on a page.

🧩 Compatibility

• Themes — works with any standards-compliant theme (Twenty Twenty-Five, GeneratePress, Astra, Kadence, Blocksy, and more).
• Page builders — Elementor, Divi, Bricks, Genesis, Avada/Fusion, Beaver Builder, WPBakery, Oxygen, and Enfold/Avia.
• Table plugins — coordinates with NinjaTables and avoids interfering with heading scraping in Fixed TOC and Easy Table of Contents.
• SEO — avoids double-highlighting content that Yoast SEO re-processes internally.
• Multilingual — works with WPML and Polylang, including translatable admin strings and a bundled wpml-config.xml .
• AMP — on AMP pages, terms render as plain links with no JavaScript.

💾 Settings backup and migration

Export all plugin settings as a JSON file, import them on another site, or reset everything to defaults from the Advanced tab.

Glossary terms are a standard WordPress content type, so they move between sites with the built-in Tools → Export and Tools → Import screens.

⌨️ Shortcodes

[glossary-list] displays the full A–Z glossary index.

• category — show terms from one or more category slugs, comma-separated. Defaults to all .
• orderby — name , date , menu_order , or rand . Defaults to name .
• order — ASC or DESC . Controls both sort direction and the direction of the letter groups. Defaults to ASC .
• letters — show or hide the letter headings. Defaults to show .
• limit — max terms per letter group, or -1 for no limit. Defaults to -1 .
• columns — arrange terms in 1 to 6 columns. Defaults to 2 .
• include_children — yes or no for including child categories.
• category_filter — yes or no to show a category filter bar (Premium).
• category_tree — yes or no to group the index by category (Premium).

Example: [glossary-list category="wordpress" orderby="date" order="DESC" columns="3"]

Use [glossary_parse] to highlight the content you wrap, e.g. [glossary_parse]This sentence gets highlighted.[/glossary_parse] .

Use [glossary-exclude] to turn highlighting off for a section: [glossary-exclude]...[/glossary-exclude] for a block, or a single [glossary-exclude] marker to skip the rest of the post. The older underscore forms ( [glossary_list] , [glossary_exclude] ) still work.

Use [glossary_footnote] to add a numbered footnote on any text: [glossary_footnote]A quick note.[/glossary_footnote] (Premium).

Use [glossary_tooltip] to show a tooltip on any text or link without a glossary term: [glossary_tooltip link="https://example.com" title="Title" content="Definition"]hover me[/glossary_tooltip] . Reference an existing term by term_id="123" or by its name/slug with term="TermName" ; the term’s tooltip follows the same excerpt, length and ellipsis rules as the auto-tooltips. With Premium you can add an image ( image="URL" ) and embed a YouTube video ( youtube="VIDEO_URL_OR_ID" , Business) inside the tooltip.

🏆 Why it stands out

• Free without the catch — automatic highlighting, tooltips, the A–Z index, live search, sorting, and performance options all work in the free version, with no usage limits.
• Built for speed — caches parsed output, inlines assets, loads scripts in the footer, and skips the parsing work when a page has no terms.
• Accessible by default — tooltips work with the keyboard (focus shows, Esc closes) and respect reduced-motion preferences.
• Plays nicely with your stack — any standards-compliant theme, the major page builders, caching and SEO plugins, AMP, and WPML/Polylang multilingual sites.
• Private by design — highlighting and tooltips are generated entirely on your own server; the free version never calls out to third-party services.
• No lock-in — glossary terms are a standard WordPress content type, so they move between sites with WordPress’s built-in export and import tools.

👑 Glossary Tooltip Premium

Take your glossary to the next level with Glossary Tooltip Premium — a companion plugin that unlocks powerful features right inside the same Glossary → Settings screen. Turn a simple word list into a rich, search-friendly knowledge center your visitors can explore and search with ease.

Standout Premium features:

• Modern tooltip styles — Modern, Material, Gradient, and Card designs with entrance animations, plus per-