For the World of Warcraft ex-NPC, see Captain Placeholder.

A placeholder is a term, sign or some other thing which generally stands in the place of content which is unknown or not identified.

In disciplines involving formal languages, particularly mathematics and computer science, the placeholder concept is represented by free variables and bound variables, and on what was originally a more light-hearted level, metasyntactic variables.

In politics, a placeholder is sometimes used to indicate that a person is acting in a position on a non-permanent basis or as a proxy.

See also

• Placeholder name
• Trope
• Lorem ipsum
• Hello world program, used in many introductory tutorials and as first programming experience
• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, text used to test typewriters