Glossary Tooltip – Highlight Terms & Show Tooltips

The Glossary Tooltip plugin automatically highlights terms within your WordPress website's content, displays tooltips with their definitions, and improves SEO and UI through automatic links. Readers understand jargon without ever leaving the article, and your content gains clean internal links that also help search engines understand your site's structure. Beyond highlighting, the plugin includes a full A–Z glossary page (a wiki-style dictionary powered by the [glossary-list] shortcode) with alphabetical navigation, live search, categories, and flexible sorting and layout options. It is a natural fit for blogs, documentation sites, knowledge bases, online courses, SaaS products, and any business, medical, financial, legal, or technical website that relies on specialized terminology. Learn more: glossarytooltip.com · Documentation · Demo · Video tutorials Automatic highlighting

• Publish once, link everywhere — add a term and it is automatically detected and linked across every post type you select. There is no manual linking.
• Synonyms and aliases — give any term alternate spellings, abbreviations, or acronyms. Each one is recognized, highlighted, and linked to the same term.
• Post-type control — choose exactly which post types (posts, pages, products, custom post types) get highlighted.
• Per-post and per-term overrides — switch highlighting or tooltips on or off for an individual post, page, or term, independent of the site-wide settings.
• Repeat control — highlight each term once, a set number of times, every Nth occurrence, or every occurrence on a page.
• Per-page first-occurrence override — on an individual post, choose to highlight each term only its first time, overriding the site-wide repeat rule for that page.

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"] [glossary_parse] — highlight the content you wrap, e.g. [glossary_parse]This sentence gets highlighted.[/glossary_parse]. [glossary-exclude] — 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. Glossary Tooltip Premium Glossary Tooltip Premium is a separate plugin that unlocks the premium features right inside the same Glossary → Settings screen. Take your glossary further:

• Modern tooltip styles — Modern, Material, Gradient, and Card designs with entrance animations, plus per-term placement and style.
• Featured images — show a term's image inside its tooltip and in the glossary index.
• Advanced live search — instant index filtering, including synonyms, abbreviations, and definitions.
• Tags & related terms — a Tags taxonomy and related-term links by tag.
• Category tree & filters — filter the index by category and present it as a category tree.
• Footnotes & external links — numbered footnotes and custom external term links with icon, new-tab, and nofollow options.
• Advanced per-post overrides — Smart Term Control with per-term placement, style, and repeat settings.
• Whitelist & blacklist support — choose exactly which terms and categories are highlighted on each post.
• Import & export terms data — move terms, settings, and media between sites.
• Multilingual & multisite support — runs on multilingual (WPML/Polylang) sites and adds network glossary tools.

See glossarytooltip.com for plans and pricing.

Automatic installation

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New Plugin.
2. Search for Glossary Tooltip.
3. Click Install Now, then Activate.

Manual installation

1. Download the plugin ZIP file.
2. Go to Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the ZIP and click Install Now, then activate it.

After activation

1. Go to Glossary → Add New Glossary Term.
2. Enter the term as the title and its definition in the editor, then publish.
3. Visit any post or page containing that word — it is now highlighted with a tooltip.
4. To show the full index, add [glossary-list] to a page or choose a glossary index page under Glossary → Settings.

3.0.0

• Added featured images, tags, footnotes, external term links, and advanced per-term controls.
• Added glossary term data import/export and improved multilingual and multisite support.
• Premium settings are now preserved across license changes without reconfiguration.
• Improved tooltip placement, styles, and animations for consistent Free and Premium behavior.
• Added improved settings, editor, and Premium account interfaces.
• Improved compatibility, code quality, and WordPress Plugin Check compliance.

2.8.0

• Added AMP support — terms render as plain links on AMP pages with no JavaScript.
• Added a Related Terms box on term pages.
• Added nested category support: include child categories automatically, plus category filter and category-tree options when Premium is active.
• Added tooltip sizing controls (font size, border width, radius, padding, position offset).
• Added glossary page styling for index letters and items (size, color, hover, background, radius).
• Added the [glossary_parse] shortcode for selective highlighting.
• Improved compatibility with Enfold/Avia, NinjaTables, Bricks, Divi, Genesis, and blog/archive excerpts.
• Added selectable tooltip styles with custom color overrides.
• Added a per-page "highlight first occurrence only" override for repeating terms.
• Added a category blacklist so terms from chosen categories are never highlighted.
• Added comments on glossary term pages, plus options to disable the glossary terms feed and the terms comments feed.
• Multiple bug fixes and performance improvements.

2.7.0

• Added highlighting for Bricks, Divi, and Genesis.
• Fixed repeated-highlighting controls and the index item font size limit.

2.6.0

• Fixed highlighting issues with images, nested code, links, attributes, accented terms, and special characters.
• Fixed blank posts using [glossary_exclude], cache refreshes, and tooltips on blog and archive pages.
• Improved tooltip keyboard and reduced-motion support.

2.5.0

• Compatibility and code quality improvements.

2.4.8

• Improved compatibility with Elementor, Avada, Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery, and Oxygen.
• Fixed accented and non-ASCII term highlighting.

2.4.0

• Added tooltip position settings, maintenance tools, system info, and import/export.

2.2.0

• Redesigned the settings screen and added advanced parsing, performance, and asset-loading options.

2.1.1

• Added synonyms, aliases, and per-term visibility controls, plus tooltip accessibility improvements.

2.0.0

• Added advanced settings, tooltip customization, and glossary index improvements.