Glossary Tooltip

Turn glossary terms into automatic links, show instant tooltips with definitions, and create a searchable A–Z glossary index page.

Automatically Highlight Glossary Terms and Show Tooltips

Glossary Tooltip automatically detects glossary terms in your WordPress website content, converts them into links, and displays clean, responsive tooltips with their definitions — helping visitors understand unfamiliar terms without leaving the page.

A built-in, searchable A–Z glossary index with live search lets visitors browse every term at a glance, while consistent internal linking between your content and its definitions improves both readability and site structure.

It’s well suited for blogs, documentation sites, knowledge bases, online courses, SaaS products, and any business, medical, financial, or legal website that relies on specialized terminology.

Official Website | Documentation | Demo | Video Tutorials | FAQs

Key Features

• Automatic term highlighting — publish a glossary term once and it’s automatically detected and linked across the post types you choose, with no manual linking.
• Responsive tooltips — definitions on hover (desktop) or tap (mobile), with configurable position, colors, width, and excerpt length.
• Searchable A–Z glossary index — a dedicated [glossary_list] index page with alphabetical navigation, live search, categories, and flexible sorting and layout.
• Categories, synonyms & aliases — organize terms into categories, and add alternate spellings or abbreviations that highlight and link back to the same term.
• Per-post and per-term overrides — turn highlighting or tooltips on or off for individual posts, pages, or specific terms, independent of the global settings.
• Flexible parsing controls — limit highlighting to chosen post types, skip headings and existing links, exclude specific HTML tags, control repeat/skip behavior, and exclude content with the [glossary_exclude] shortcode.
• Built for performance — optional content caching, footer script loading, inline asset delivery, and smart parsing that skips content with no matching terms.
• Settings backup & migration — export or import all plugin settings as JSON, reset to defaults, and move glossary terms between sites with WordPress’s built-in Tools → Export/Import.

Shortcodes

This plugin includes two shortcodes: [glossary_list] to display your glossary index, and [glossary_exclude] to turn off glossary highlighting on part or all of a specific post or page.

[glossary_list]

Add this shortcode to any post or page to display your full glossary list there — an alphabetically organized (A-Z) list of all your glossary terms, with optional jump navigation and a live search box.

Basic example, showing every glossary term with the default settings:

[glossary_list]

Supported attributes

• category="all" — Only show terms assigned to one or more Glossary Categories. Use a single category slug (e.g. category="seo"), or several separated by commas to show terms matching any of them (e.g. category="seo,wordpress"). Defaults to all, which shows every term regardless of category.
• orderby="name" — Chooses how terms are sorted within each A-Z letter group. A term never moves out of its own letter group — only the order of terms inside each group, and the order the groups themselves appear in, follow orderby/order together. Accepted values: name (alphabetical), date (publish date), menu_order (the custom order set on the Glossary Terms screen), or rand (random order, reshuffled on every page load — group order is unaffected by order in this case). Defaults to name.
• order="ASC" — Sets the sort direction used by orderby, and also the direction the A-Z letter groups themselves run in. Accepted values: ASC (ascending — groups run A to Z, terms sort oldest to newest for orderby="date") or DESC (descending — groups run Z to A, terms sort newest to oldest for orderby="date"). Defaults to ASC. Has no effect on term order when orderby="rand", and no effect on group order at all when orderby="rand".
• letters="show" — Shows or hides the big A-Z letter heading above each group of terms. Accepted values: show or hide. Defaults to show.
• limit="-1" — The maximum number of terms to display per A-Z letter group — not a total for the whole index. For example, limit="2" shows at most 2 terms under A, at most 2 under B, at most 2 under C, and so on. Use -1 for no limit, showing every matching term. Defaults to -1.
• columns="2" — How many columns to arrange the terms into within each letter group. Accepts a whole number from 1 to 6. Defaults to 2.

Read the full description on the official page →