A control led vocabulary is a list of terms whose meanings are specifically defined. The purpose is to improve technical communication by ensuring that everyone is using the same word to mean the same thing. This consistency of terms is one of the most important concepts in technical writing and knowledge management, where effort is expended to use the same word throughout a document or organization instead of slightly different ones to refer to the same thing.

Controlled vocabularies are also important practical tools in library and information science, where they help searchers retrieve consistent results regardless of the term they choose.

=See also=

*Authority control *Metadata *Semantic spectrum *Subject heading *Thesaurus

=External links=