boilerplate vs reference

boilerplate

noun
  • Syndicated material. 

  • A sheet of copper or steel used in the construction of a boiler. 

  • The rating plate or nameplate required to be affixed to a boiler by the Boiler Explosions Act (1882). 

  • Standard text or program code used routinely and added with a text editor or word processor; text of a legal or official nature added to documents or labels. 

  • Hard, icy snow which may be dangerous to ski on. 

  • Formulaic or hackneyed language. 

  • A plate attached to industrial machinery, identifying information such as manufacturer, model number, serial number, and power requirements. 

verb
  • To store (standard text) so that it can easily be retrieved for reuse. 

adj
  • Describing text or other material of a standard or routine nature. 

  • Used to refer to a non-functional spacecraft used to test configuration and procedures. 

reference

noun
  • A reference work. 

  • A measurement one can compare (some other measurement) to. 

  • Information about a person, provided by someone (a referee) with whom they are well acquainted. 

  • The act of referring: a submitting for information or decision. 

  • A previously published written work thus indicated; a source. 

  • A special sequence used to represent complex characters in markup languages, such as ™ for the ™ symbol. 

  • A relation between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. 

  • An object containing information which refers to data stored elsewhere, as opposed to containing the data itself. 

  • A person who provides this information; a referee. 

  • A short written identification of a previously published work which is used as a source for a text. 

verb
  • To provide a list of references for (a text). 

  • To refer to, to use as a reference. 

  • To mention, to cite. 

  • To contain the value that is a memory address of some value stored in memory. 

How often have the words boilerplate and reference occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )