What Are Stopwords?
Common words that carry little meaning.
What Are Stopwords? is a free NLP Academy lesson on CoddyKit — lesson 1 of 4. You can read the complete lesson below for free — then practise it hands-on in the browser with a built-in code editor and a 24/7 AI tutor. It is part of the NLP Academy learning path, one of 4 lessons in the course, and your progress syncs across the web and the CoddyKit app.
Words That Carry Little Meaning
Some words show up everywhere but tell you almost nothing about a topic. We call these stopwords, and learning to spot them is your first cleanup skill.
Spot Them Yourself
Read this line: the cat sat on the mat. The real signal is cat, sat, mat. Words like the and on are just glue holding the sentence together.
Why They Hurt
Stopwords are so common they appear in almost every document. That makes them useless for telling one document apart from another.
The Usual Suspects
Typical English stopwords include the, a, is, and, of, to, in, and it. Pronouns and prepositions show up here a lot.
Noise vs Signal
Think of NLP as listening for a voice in a noisy room. Removing stopwords turns down the noise so the meaningful words come through clearly.
A Tiny Stopword Set
You can start with a small set of your own. A Python set gives fast membership checks, which is exactly what filtering needs.
stopwords = {"the", "a", "is", "and", "of", "to"}
print("the" in stopwords)Why a Set, Not a List
Checking if a word is in a set is near-instant, even with thousands of stopwords. A list would get slower as it grows.
Not One True List
There is no single official list. Every library and project keeps its own stopword list, so they differ slightly from one another.
When to Keep Them
Stopwords are not always trash. For tasks like sentiment or author style, small words like not and very carry real meaning you should keep.
Domain Stopwords
Your own data may have its own noise. In legal text, words like hereby or shall act as domain stopwords worth removing too.
The Cleanup Mindset
Removing stopwords is one step in a bigger cleaning habit: drop what adds no signal, keep what helps your model decide.
Quick Check
Let us make sure the idea of a stopword stuck.
Recap
Nice work. Stopwords are super-common words that add little signal, so we often filter them out, while keeping ones that matter for the task.
Frequently asked questions
Is the “What Are Stopwords?” lesson free?
Yes — the full text of “What Are Stopwords?” is free to read here on the web, and the NLP Academy course includes 4 lessons in total. To practise it interactively (a built-in code editor and a 24/7 AI tutor) and unlock the rest of the NLP Academy course, upgrade to CoddyKit PRO.
What will I learn in “What Are Stopwords?”?
Common words that carry little meaning. You practise NLP Academy with hands-on code you run directly in the browser, and a 24/7 AI tutor answers your questions as you work through the lesson.
Do I need any experience to start NLP Academy?
No prior experience is required. NLP Academy on CoddyKit is structured for beginners through advanced learners; this is — lesson 1 of 4, so you can start here or from the beginning and move at your own pace.
How long does the “What Are Stopwords?” lesson take?
Most CoddyKit lessons take about 5–10 minutes. Each one is bite-sized and interactive, so you make steady progress and pick up exactly where you left off across the web and the app.
Can I write and run code in this NLP Academy lesson?
Yes. Every NLP Academy lesson includes a built-in code editor, so you write and run real code right in your browser and get instant AI feedback — no local setup required.