Appendix

Research

Supporting material placed at the end of a paper — raw data, transcripts, survey instruments — that backs up the argument without interrupting the main text's flow.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — appendix merriam-webster.com accessed 22 September 2026

Merriam-Webster gives “supplementary material usually attached at the end of a piece of writing”, alongside the anatomical sense. Borrowed from Latin appendix, “something subordinate or supplementary attached to a larger unit”, from appendere, to hang onto something larger. First recorded 1549 in the written sense. Both plurals are current — appendixes and appendices — so neither is a mistake.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. How the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own reading.

Deeper treatment: this term also has a full entry in the Business Library.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.