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In the following book page, I have both paragraphs (which is a block of the same type of text) and some special paragraphs which are statements forming a special praying sentence.

Here is the original page, and a marked form of it:

A page of Hebrew printed text. At the top is a page number and a bold centered page header. Then there's a heading followed by a small-text centered subhead, then a big block of justified text. After that, there's a series of lines with some text aligned left, a gap, and some more text aligned right. Then there's another centered heading followed by a small-text centered subheading, and what looks like the start of another block of text. At the bottom is what looks like a footnote. The same page of Hebrew printed text, but there's a blue circle hand-drawn around: the top header line; the big block of text; each of the right-aligned bits of text; each of the left-aligned bits of text; the second heading; and the block of text at the bottom. There are no circles around the small-text subheadings, the page header, the page number, or the footnote.

How can I call each item in the marked picture: snippet, paragraph, section or element? Is there a better term that can describe them both?

Understanding the meaning of the above text is not that important as this is not a regular book but one like the bible. That is why I marked the text with blue circles. This allows me to demonstrate the types of text that we have in this book, which is two: one is paragraphs or big Siddur sections like the text in the big circles, and the other contains a Siddur paragraph/section that contains a bunch of smaller elements. Each element is a different section as you can see from the special outline.

What I'm looking for is a word that will describe each element that is atomic. Each circle is the atomic element.

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This doesn't relate to English, and knowing what each outlined passage says is quite important to describing it. Even if it were English, it's probably General Reference. –  Andrew Leach Jun 14 '12 at 8:27
The original text may not be English, but the O.P. is asking for an English word to describe each section (or element) of the text; that ought to be kept in mind before casting a vote to close. (This might still be general reference, but it's certainly not a question about Hebrew. That said, Andrew is right, it would be much easier to propose a fitting name if one could translate the text. Is that top one a title? A header? It's hard to tell without knowing what it says or means.) –  J.R. Jun 14 '12 at 8:42
@J.R. I did think, and had several goes at the comment. While asking about "snippets" and "paragraphs" is reasonable (but may well be general reference), I don't think this question is answerable in its current form, because I don't believe we should need to be Hebrew readers to answer questions. I don't think I'd have an issue if the images were in English. Perhaps the final version of my comment was a bit brief, for which I apologise. –  Andrew Leach Jun 14 '12 at 8:53
@Andrew: Maybe I should apologize; I didn't mean to denigrate your initial comment. Once close votes start trickling in, though, it's sometimes easy to "pile on" – I merely wanted to give others food for thought before pulling the trigger. Although I believe the picture is decipherable (that looks like a table with a caption in the lower half), we are in accord that the question might be easier to answer accurately with a more intelligible visual aid. –  J.R. Jun 14 '12 at 9:16
I updated the question with some guidance about the contained text. Understanding the text is not important, and since this I didn't found any equivalent document in English that I can post here, that will show this behavior. –  Fitzchak Yitzchaki Jun 14 '12 at 9:24

3 Answers 3

For a general term that describes each of those "snippets," I'd propose Layout Elements.


That term is widely used in webpage design, so, when you Google the term, you'll see a preponderance of results related to graphical web design. However, the term "layout" is borrowed from the early days of printing. This website does a good job of defining layout elements from the printed page perspective, and gives many examples as well. (I'll offer this one screen shot, to appease the link rot police, but this is just a small sample of what's in the entire guideline):

enter image description here

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

I think that they best be called Snippets. From Wikipedia:


Since these sections may be repeated a few times, I may call them Siddur Snippets. Snippet will be describe granular text in the book, that may be repeated in somewhere else of the book.

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Though probably not the proper linguistic term (if such exists), I would refer to them as blocks, indicating that they are self-contained elements on the page.

A paragraph can easily be considered a block of text, but so can a title, subtitle, etc.

I disagree with the use of "snippet" as that strongly implies a certain amount of reusability or recomposition of the elements, and I'm not getting that from your question at all.

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