Term of convenience

A term of convenience is a word or short phrase arrived at to describe a particular concept in the absence of a generally recognized word or phrase meaning the same thing.

Often it is necessary to discuss a concept for which there is no generally recognized word or phrase. Within the context of hypertext writing, however, it is simple enough to decide on a term which is at least unambiguous (i.e. not easily confused with another existing term) and link initial usages of that term to a page describing its contextual usage in more detail. (If a better or more widely-recognized term is found later on, it is simple enough – though possibly somewhat tedious – to search for and replace all uses of the term of convenience with the preferred term.)

A term of convenience is essentially a stipulative definition applied over a more prolonged context (in this case, all subsequent discussion within a particular web site until such time as there is a consensus that a different term should be used).