KWIC
noun
KWIC is a noun meaning “Initialism of keyword in context: a list of phrases obtained by searching a corpus, each containing the node (or word of interest) and its…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled K-W-I-C, and it appears about once in every 83 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of KWIC is KWICs.
What does KWIC mean?
noun
- 1
Initialism of keyword in context: a list of phrases obtained by searching a corpus, each containing the node (or word of interest) and its surrounding cotext.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of KWIC
- KWICs plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is KWIC?
KWIC appears about once in every 83 million words in written English, the 290,185th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does KWIC come from?
Coined by IBM research engineer Hans Peter Luhn.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).