ETYM Late Lat. documentum, from docere to teach: cf. French document. Related to Docile.
1. A written account of ownership or obligation.
2. Anything serving as a representation of a person's thinking by means of symbolic marks.
3. Writing that provides information (especially information of an official nature); SYN. written document, papers.

1. To record in detail.
2. To support with evidence.
In computing, data associated with a particular application. For example, a text document might be produced by a word processor and a graphics document might be produced with a CAD package. An OMR or OCR document is a paper document containing data that can be directly input to the computer using a document reader.

Any self-contained piece of work created with an application program and, if saved on disk, given a unique filename by which it can be retrieved. Documents are generally thought of as word-processed materials only. To a computer, however, data is nothing more than a collection of characters, so a spreadsheet or a graphic is as much a document as is a letter or report. In the Macintosh environment in particular, a document is any user-created work named and saved as a separate file.

To explain or annotate something, such as a program or a procedure.