placeholder
nounUS /ˈpleɪsˌhoʊldɚ/
Etymology From place + holder.
1
Something used or included temporarily or as a substitute for something that is not known or must remain generic; that which holds, denotes or reserves a place for something to come later.
- This data is a placeholder, so you'll want to include the real numbers as soon as you have them.
- As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er.2007 August 24, William Grimes, “Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 04 Jan 2013:
1 more example
- "I'm on vacation," [Bruce] Willis grumbles several times throughout A Good Day To Die Hard, in what counts as the film's sole running joke, a lame placeholder until he arrives at the big "yippee-ki-yay" punchline.2013 February 14, Scott Tobias, “A Good Day To Die Hard [film review]”, in The AV Club, archived from the original on 10 Mar 2016:
2
Computing, Engineering, Graphical user interface, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences A non-editable caption initially displayed in a blank text box to indicate its function.
- Synonyms
- thingy, whatshisname
- Related terms
- greek, greeking, lorem ipsum