word processing

American  

Or word-processing

noun

1. writing, editing, and production of documents, as letters, reports, and books, through the use of a computer program or a complete computer system designed to facilitate rapid and efficient manipulation of text. WP

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word processing British  

noun

1. the composition of documents using a computer system to input, edit, store, and print them

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Etymology

Origin of word processing

First recorded in 1970–75

Example Sentences

Microsoft Word brought word processing to the masses.

From The Wall Street Journal • May 19, 2026

"We sometimes overvalue the role of proprietary software in our organisations," Mr Maisto says, pointing out that for key services like word processing and email, open-source solutions work just fine.

From BBC • Aug. 17, 2025

For example, it is well established how much energy a computer with word processing software uses per hour.

From Science Daily • Apr. 2, 2024

At its heart, says Australian technologist David Gerard, ChatGPT is “a stupendously scaled-up autocomplete,” like a word processing program predicting the end of a word or sentence you’ve started typing.

From Los Angeles Times • Jul. 13, 2023

Many high end word processing programs like Microsoft Word allow you to include a reference to an external Postscript file containing the figure.

From Email 101 by Goodwin, John

Related Words

• data processing