Informational and informative can be easily confused with each other. They sound and look so similar, but how similar are they when compared to each other? What is the difference between the two and how can you tell which one you need to use?
To get a better understanding, let’s take a look at what each word means and how each word is used.
Informational is referring to or characterized by facts about something in a way that provides information. For example, a brochure is considered informational. Nonfiction texts like a history book or autobiographies are also considered informational.
Informational text has a primary purpose of informing about something in the natural or social world. There are a few ways that you can determine whether or not something is informational.
First, check the accuracy. Is the information accurate, direct, and timely with the ability to enhance a young child’s knowledge? Next, check the authority of the author. What credentials and qualifications does the author have on the topic?
Some of the features to look for in a text that is considered informational are a table of contents, a glossary, an index, bold words, headings, pictures with captions, and labeled diagrams.
Some topics considered informational are:
Stress
Addiction
A college campus brochure
Censorship
Cost of college
Example Sentences
A family binder contains all of the informational details for each member.
The brochure for the college contained information data on the courses available.
In the mailbox, there were informational flyers and pamphlets about nearby activities.
Along with a map, you will also get an informational page about the exhibit you are visiting in the museum.
Informative
Informative is providing information that is useful or interesting. For example, reading an article on a subject is considered informative. A lecture that teaches you a lot of information is also considered to be informative.
Text can also be considered informative when in the form of an essay. The purpose of an informative essay is educating others on a topic. An informative essay will usually answer the questions of who, what, when, where, and why.
An informative essay will never contain an opinion or try to convince others to take action. The structure will have a beginning, middle, and end in the form of an introduction, body, and conclusion.
Some topics that are considered informative are:
How to open up a new bank account
Poverty in the world
The effects of procrastination
Pollution of the air and water
Recycling
Example Sentences
The lecture was very informative and well worth the trip.
When writing an informative article, avoid negative words.
I read a very informative article about diabetes the other day.
Debates are usually highly informative and bring attention to different arguments.
What is the Difference?
The terms are very similar to each other and it can be really difficult to determine which one you are supposed to use and when. The main difference between the two words is that informative is providing you information that is specifically useful or interesting and informational is more geared towards making information known with or without specifics.
Informative also has a positive meaning like “I learned something today” For example, you could hear it after attending a lecture.
That lecture on first aid was very informative.
Informational has more of a neutral meaning, the text has information but it is more functional information like where the fire escapes are.
The informational brochures about the school can be found at reception.
Can They Be Used in Place of Each Other?
Informational and informative can absolutely be used in place of each other. They are synonyms(both adjectives) for each other, meaning that the definitions are similar enough to each other that they can be used interchangeably. The definitions of the two words are so close to each other that it will not cause any kind of confusion with the statement. A text that is informational can also be referred to as informative.
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Conor is the main writer here at One Minute English and was an English teacher for 10 years. He is interested in helping people with their English skills and learning about using A.I tools at work.
Definitions For Informational
adjective
- Relating to or having the nature of information
noun
- Knowledge that you get about someone or something : facts or details about a subject
- A service that telephone users can call to find out the telephone number for a specified person or organization
English International (SOWPODS)
YES
Points in Different Games
Scrabble
Words with Friends
The word Informational is worth 18 points in Scrabble and 22 points in Words with Friends
Examples of Informational in a Sentence
- They’re working to collect information about the early settlers in the region.
- The pamphlet provides a lot of information on recent changes to the tax laws.
- He gave the police false information about his background.
1
a(1)
: knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction
b
: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects
c(1)
: a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data
(2)
: something (such as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (such as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct
d
: a quantitative measure of the content of information
specifically
: a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed
2
: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence
4
: a formal accusation of a crime made by a prosecuting officer as distinguished from an indictment presented by a grand jury
Synonyms
Example Sentences
They’re working to collect information about the early settlers in the region.
The pamphlet provides a lot of information on recent changes to the tax laws.
He gave the police false information about his background.
The conference will give us an opportunity to exchange information with other researchers.
We can’t make a decision until we have more information.
The tests have not yet uncovered any new information.
I don’t like having to reveal personal information when I fill in a job application.
He’s accused of withholding useful information.
I couldn’t remember his number so I had to call information.
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Recent Examples on the Web
Historical information about players like Ty Cobb and Al Kaline, all the way to current player Miguel Cabrera, is painted on the walls.
—
Evan Petzold, Detroit Free Press, 8 Apr. 2023
For more information, go to KaoBarandGrill.com.
—Phillip Valys, Sun Sentinel, 8 Apr. 2023
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
—Karen Wilkin, wsj.com, 8 Apr. 2023
For more information on the first-class services and offerings aboard the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 777, head to Emirates.com.
—Lydia Mansel, Travel + Leisure, 8 Apr. 2023
For more information on the project, email africatownwelcomecenter@cityofmobile.org.
—Lawrence Specker | , al, 8 Apr. 2023
For more information, go to https://hampsteadmd.gov/.
—Sherry Greenfield, Baltimore Sun, 8 Apr. 2023
For more information, visit noblebb.com.
—Haadiza Ogwude, The Enquirer, 7 Apr. 2023
For more information To support Make-A-Wish Wisconsin, visit www.wish.org/wisconsin/give or call 262 -781-4445.
—Cathy Kozlowicz, Journal Sentinel, 7 Apr. 2023
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These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘information.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Word History
First Known Use
14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a
Time Traveler
The first known use of information was
in the 14th century
Dictionary Entries Near information
Cite this Entry
“Information.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/information. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023.
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More from Merriam-Webster on information
Last Updated:
10 Apr 2023
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Merriam-Webster unabridged
‘information’
- An old word with new life
- The meaning of information
- Towards ‘fatigue’ and ‘overload’
- Where next with the OED Online?
- About the OED
If the content of OED is now more extensive and diverse than that of previous editions, we could say the same of the dictionary’s readership. Usage statistics from the OED Online show that—as a rough average—every second of every day someone somewhere in the world is extracting an OED entry to read. We can record which entries are searched and viewed, and that in turn can help us prioritize our work in revising and updating the text. What impresses us most forcibly when we review the reports of OED Online usage is not so much the regularity with which certain prominent words are searched—and yes, as for any dictionary, the F-word invariably features—but rather the vast array of terms searched relatively infrequently. What distinguishes OED from other dictionaries—the sheer range of vocabulary, the depth of historical coverage—is both understood and exploited by its readers. That in turn enhances our own sense of editorial purpose in undertaking such a comprehensive revision of the text.
An old word with new life
We now routinely prioritize for immediate work many of the most frequently searched entries, as well as those exhibiting significant linguistic productivity in the twentieth century. In the latter category, we recently revised the entry for information. This is a word whose growth in the last 100 years both reflects and embodies major cultural and technological change, yet it hasn’t always garnered much attention. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams doesn’t list information in his 1976 work, Keywords. R.S. Leghorn, the first recorded user of information age, while confident (and astute) about the wide social impact of information technology, was dismissive of the phrase he used to describe it:
1960 R.S. Leghorn in H.B. Maynard Top Managem. Handbk. xlvii. 1024 Present and anticipated spectacular informational achievements will usher in public recognition of the ‘information age’, probably under a more symbolic title.
Why? Well, information does lack the ancient heft of stone, iron or bronze, but what makes it so distinctive as the fabric of mass communication is the very combination of immateriality and massiveness, its overwhelming diffuseness. It’s also a word which provides a point of imaginative sympathy between OED‘s editors and readers. The search for definitive information is the principal aim in our experience of writing the dictionary, as it is yours in reading it.
The growing availability and abundance of information through print, broadcast, and then digital media is inevitably mirrored in the increasing use of the word. Its rising profile can be measured by counting and ranking the frequency of its appearances in searchable text corpora amassed over the past few decades. The Project Gutenberg corpus of mostly pre-1900 literature lists it as the 486th most frequent word; the 1967 Brown Corpus of contemporary American English places it 346th; and the 1997 British National Corpus lists it as 219th. A recent survey of online usage reported information as the 22nd most frequently used word. While these statistics need to be treated with some caution—neither the corpora themselves nor the analytical methods applied are strictly comparable—the impression they convey is accurate. This is an old word with a new lease of life. Its prolific growth is reflected in a revised OED entry twice the size of the original.
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The meaning of information
Information began life in English with a specific sense, borrowed from (Anglo-Norman) French: accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a person. Excepting specific legal contexts, that’s no longer an active sense, though it survives as a dominant meaning of related terms like informant and informer. Ostensibly, information became a more neutral term, but it has always retained the sense of something that might be offered or exchanged to someone’s advantage. Perhaps because information is such a tradable commodity, as a word it also tends to form attachments freely, as shown by the greatly expanded array of compounds in the revised OED entry. The way in which a word combines with others can be highly revealing not just of its semantic reach (how its meanings grow and flourish) but of its wider cultural associations.
The earliest compound attested in OED (information office) dates from 1782. It first described a service for British colonists arriving in India, later a similar function to other groups of international emigrants and travellers. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, mass transit and communications began to take shape. Compounds arising in that period reflect information as a commodity with supply and demand: information-giving (dating from 1829), information-seeking (1869), information gathering (1893). They also tend to suggest relatively small-scale means of collection and distribution: information bureau (1869), information room (1874). In the last decades of the nineteenth century we begin to find terms which evoke some idea of professionalization: information agent (1871), information service (1885), information officer (1889), information work (1890), and information gatherer (1899). The abiding sense is that information can be collected, managed, marshalled, and disseminated. The means are formal but typically interpersonal: one person with the requisite expertise could find you what you need to know. Information is controllable and controlled; entrusted to some, who provide it for others.
The emergence of computer technology roughly coincides with the OED Supplement’s second round of work on information. Information technology itself was added in the 1976 Supplement volume with a first date of 1958, but now in OED3 it appears as a separate entry, with quotation evidence dating from 1952 (in a slightly different sense). The Supplement’s editors identified and included many of the earliest compounds evoking the sense of information as data, something to be stored, processed, or distributed electronically: information processing, information retrieval, information storage (all three dated from 1950). In quick succession came terms relating to the academic study of the phenomenon, appearing in a neatly logical sequence: first the idea (information theory, 1950), next its budding adherents (information scientist, 1953), then the established field of study (information science, 1955).
While those earlier coinages are generally suggestive of the beneficial or transformational power of electronic data, it is not long before the social consequences of the information age start to emerge. The need for skilled mediation emerges: information broker (1964), information architect (1966), information architecture (1969)—the more evolved hi-tech counterparts of information gatherer. There is an increasing sense—harking back to that very first meaning—of information being used to one’s benefit or another’s disadvantage: not merely controlled and managed, but deficient or adequate: information-rich (1959), information-poor (1970).
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Towards ‘fatigue’ and ‘overload’
Here at the OED, as work on the third edition progresses, we are nothing if not information-rich. The proliferation online of text archives, historical corpora, and searchable facsimiles has vastly enhanced the quantity and depth of linguistic data at our disposal for research. Where the dictionary’s original editors often struggled to find sufficient quotation evidence for common senses (volunteer readers tending naturally to alight on the exotic or unfamiliar), today’s historical lexicographers struggle to deal with the copiousness of evidence. Abundance is—well, abundant. The adverse psychological impact of the information age manifests itself linguistically, in information overload (1962) and in the entry for information fatigue (1991). Although those two last phrases are simply the latest additions to OED‘s coverage, for those engaged in any form of online research they could just as well describe the arc of a working day. Perhaps this is why the OED definition of information fatigue, while entirely accurate, also sounds faintly heartfelt:
Apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, esp. (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the Internet, or at work.
In dictionaries, as elsewhere, a statement can be at once plainly factual and profoundly human.
‘Information is a distraction’, President Obama is reported to have said recently. He was commenting specifically on gadgetry’s power to divert us from higher purposes:
With iPods and iPads and XBoxes and PlayStations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.
He would probably be dismayed to know there exists a visualized Hierarchy of Digital Distractions—email, text messages, social media, etc.—at David McAndless’ Information is Beautiful. The fact that the President was widely misquoted (or his words decontexualized) perhaps only served to underline the broader point he sought to make: that in an age in which each of us is assailed on all sides with unfiltered information, identifying the reliable sources becomes at once harder and more important. Perhaps that’s where the OED can help.
Where next with the OED Online?
- The revised entry for information appears as part of the December 2010 update of OED3. Updates are published four times a year, with details of recent additions available. December’s update also includes digital, the subject of another OED Word Story.
- With the Historical Thesaurus of the OED you can trace the development of synonyms for the original meaning of information—‘the action of imparting accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a person’—from peaching to whistle-blowing.
- The decade that gave us information overload also saw the first recorded use of answerphone (1963), vox pop (1966), and pager (1968).
How do I search for this? With subscriber access, use the Historical Thesaurus to trace how objects, actions, and concepts have been described over time. Or use Advanced search to find words by subject and date: here choose Browse subject (and select ‘Telecommunications’ under ‘Technology’) along with the range, 1960-1970.
About the OED
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- News & Views
- When I use a word . . …
- When I use a word . . . . Information
Opinion
BMJ
2023;
380
doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p465
(Published 24 February 2023)
Cite this as: BMJ 2023;380:p465
- Jeffrey K Aronson
- Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
- Twitter @JKAronson
Information in common parlance means knowledge communicated about particular facts, subjects, or events; a fact, for example, is a piece of information. However, in computing science information has a different meaning, given by information theory, and is the degree of choice exercised when a particular symbol or message is chosen from a range of possible symbols or messages, the choice being probabilistically determined. The latest outcome of this is the development of GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers), or chatbots, which may facilitate the writing of medical and other scientific texts. The extent to which this may be advantageous or otherwise is not yet clear, but there will certainly be unintended consequences.
Language games
As I recently discussed,1 different constituencies, such as scientific specialties, may use different languages, or language games. A language game is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “a speech activity or complete, but limited, system of communication and action, which may or may not form a part of the existing use of language in its wider context.”2
Language games consist of two components: “parole” and “langue.” The former is defined as “The actual linguistic behaviour or performance of individuals on specific occasions, in contrast to language viewed as an abstract system.”3 The latter is defined as “Language (or a language) viewed as an abstract system, accepted universally within a speech community, in contrast to the actual linguistic behaviour or performance of individuals.”4 This distinction, individual versus social aspects of language, was first suggested by Ferdinand de Saussure, to describe language systems of groups on the one hand and specific instances of the ways in which languages are used on the other.5
All this implies that a word may have different meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. A word may mean different things in different language games—the parlances used by different people, such as doctors or computer experts. In some cases a word may be given a specialised meaning that it does not have in common parlance.
A medical example is the word “alternative” as in “alternative medicine.” Here it does not imply a type of medical practice that may legitimately be used as a substitute for standard forms of practice, but rather one that is regarded as scientifically unproven and, by implication, of no value.
“Information” is another word that has different meanings in different language games.
Information
The verb “form” comes from the Latin word forma, meaning a shape or configuration, and the corresponding verb, formare. Adding a range of prefixes gives us the verbs conform, deform, perform, preform, reform, transform, and of course inform. In turn “information” comes from the Latin noun informatio, meaning the formation of an idea, conception; in post-classical Latin it also came to mean teaching or instruction.
In ordinary parlance, the word “information” means “Knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news.”6 And a fact, for example, is a piece of information. However, in a different language game, that of computer science, it means something different: “a mathematically defined quantity [that] represents the degree of choice exercised in the selection or formation of one particular symbol, message, etc., out of a number of possible ones, and which is defined logarithmically in terms of the statistical probabilities of occurrence of the symbol or the elements of the message.”6
This idea was first enunciated in embryo by Ronald Fisher in statistical terms in 1925: “What we have spoken of as the intrinsic accuracy of an error curve may equally be conceived as the amount of information in a single observation belonging to such a distribution”7 and later by Norbert Wiener in 1948, in cybernetics, a term that he invented from the Greek word for a steersman, κυβερνήτης, and quoting a personal communication from John von Neumann: “Thus a reasonable measure of the amount of information associated with the curve f1(x) is [the integral from minus infinity to infinity] of (log2f1(x))f1(x).dx.8
However, it was the mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, later called the father of information theory, who, with a background of cryptography, introduced the concept of information as a quantitative and probabilistic analysis of how information is produced and transmitted. He did so in a highly technical paper published in 1948.910 A more accessible description by Shannon’s colleague Warren Weaver appeared in 1949, under the heading “Recent contributions to the mathematical theory of communication”11:
“The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information. … [I]nformation in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message. … The concept of information applies not to the individual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an amount of freedom of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient to regard as a standard or unit amount.”
Just as the word “message” is sometimes used to describe an electrical impulse transmitted by a nerve fibre, or the information encoded in a gene, so it is used in computer science to mean the electronic instructions encoded in a computer programme. Weaver went on to explain that if one had two computerised messages to choose between, one might be coded as “zero” and the other as “one.” In that case the first message could be sent via a closed electrical circuit, with current flowing, the second via an open one, with no current flowing. Then the amount of information being transmitted would be measured by the natural logarithm of the number of available choices, log22N, which equals N. [Base 2 is chosen because electrical circuits have two possible states, off or on.] With two messages to choose between, the amount of information is log221, which equals unity. The statistician John Tukey suggested that this unit of information should be called a “bit,” a shortened form of “binary digit.” So, when there are, say, eight messages from which to choose, the amount of information in the system equals three bits, since 8=23. The eight choices might be encoded in binary notation as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101 110, and 111. This shows that three electrical relays, corresponding to the three bits, could transmit the information, each being either open or closed in the different cases.
And here probabilities enter the system. For instance, if we are transmitting a simple English sentence, it will be likely that it has the form “subject, verb, object,” as in the sentence “Catullus loves Lesbia.” In that case, the probability that the word following “Catullus” will be a verb is greater than the probability that it will be any other part of speech, such as an adverb, a preposition, or a conjunction, increasing the probability that a particular form of code will be used. Likewise, another noun is likely to follow the verb. Or, to take another example: in Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence, “colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” the order of adjective, adjective, noun, verb, adverb follows a well formed syntactical structure. The meaninglessness of the sentence is irrelevant.
Other features of the language also impose restrictions. Consider, for example, collocations: the phrase “it is likely” will almost certainly be followed by the word “that”—the two being commonly collocated. Spelling can also make a difference; for example, the probability that the letter q will be followed in English words by a u is very high, although there are a few loan words in which, because of transliteration, that is not the case (e.g. qanat, qi, and qoph).
Weaver then goes on to explain that when a source of information is producing a message that consists of discrete symbols (such as letters, words, musical notes, or pictorial symbols), and when the probability that any symbol or symbols that will be chosen depends on the choice of the previous symbol or symbols, a so-called Markoff chain, the system is exactly analogous to the thermodynamic process known as entropy, which is expressed in terms of the logarithm of the probabilities involved. And, indeed, the entropy of the system in terms of information is equal to the freedom of choice within the system.
Weaver ended his account by poetically asserting that “entropy not only speaks the language of arithmetic; it also speaks the language of language.”
Outcomes
Through information theory, telecommunications became digital rather than analogue, and it allowed the development of methods of encoding any message that needs to be sent electronically. Now the langue and parole of linguistic theory become the code and message of information theory.
Encoding of language in this way also led to the concept of a “white space,” such as the space between words, a tab, or a carriage return, each of which needs to be encoded electronically in order to communicate a piece of text.
Recent developments include natural language processing, which today, among other things, has resulted in programs known as GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers), of which ChatGPT, an AI conversationalist robot that can supposedly write medical papers, has rapidly become the best known.121314 The extent to which this may be advantageous or otherwise is not yet clear, but there will certainly be unintended consequences.
And now, if anyone is wondering whether I use a chatbot to help me write my When I Use a Word columns, I can assure them that I do not. At least, not yet.
Footnotes
-
Competing interests: None declared
-
Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.