Philipp: Thank you---I appreciate your effort on glossarium.lua very much, but I don't want to be dependent on you every time I want to tweek my glossary. I find it difficult to change the appearance and behavior of anything in Context, but I think my chances are better with it than with trying to work in lua. So, I have pursued the problem via the \definesynonyms approach. What I have so far can do all the basic things I imagined, and only seems to need some cosmetic work now. This is what I have: In the preamble: \definesynonyms[gentry][gentries][\infull][\inshort] %to connect headwords to entries \definesynonyms[gloss][glosses][\tttext][\ttkey] %to make short glosses available for tooltips \def\gldef#1#2#3{\gloss{#1}{#2}\gentry{#1}{#3 {(p.\at[g:#1])}}} \def\hint#1{\tooltip[middle]{#1}{\tttext{#1}}} \def\glref#1{\reference[g:#1]{}} %to place at a substantive reference in the text %then you have a file of definitions like this one: \gldef{vibrato}{a periodic fluctuation in pitch}{A periodic fluctuation of pitch, typically in the range 6--12~Hz.} Then, in the text, when you use an unfamiliar word and the reader could benefit from a quick, pop-up gloss: \hint{vibrato} (I just need a more sophisticated version of this that can deal with variants of the word). And, when you are about to engage in a substantive discussion of a word or phrase that appears in the glossary (for a given headword, there might be zero, one, or several such points in the text): \glref{vibrato} (This causes a page reference after the glossary entry.) I have two questions remaining: 1. I was somehow able to guess that \definesynonyms[gentry][gentries] creates a new command called "\setupgentries[]", and I imagine this command must inherit its possible keys and values from another command, but I don't know what. Where can I look it up? 2. How can I modify the appearance/location/behavior of tooltips? I tried \setuptooltips, but apparently that's not it. I'll tinker with this and test it for a while. Eventually I hope to contribute a glossaries "my way" to the garden. Hans: No problem! I'm sure whatever I put in the Google translator was just as articulate as what came out of it. Really, I think the mistake is mine. All along I have been assuming that Context was like LaTeX: a system for end-users, a language where an author could easily manipulate the appearance of his document. Apparently, it's more like a supporting infrastructure for that. Maybe it needs a layer of macros sitting on top of it to make it accessible and friendly to users/writers. I'm hoping Idris's book will shed light on this. Thanks, everyone.