Stop words are those words which are so common that they are useless to index or use in searches. In English some obvious stop words would be "a," "of," "the," "I,", "it", "you," and "and". Hans Peter Luhn, one of the pioneers in information retrieval is credited with coining the phrase and using the concept in his design and implementation of KWIC indexing programs.

External links

• A List of English Stop Words (about 3 kilobytes).