A representation term is a word, or a combination of words, that semantically represent the data type (value domain) of a data element. A representation term is commonly referred to as a "class word" by those familiar with data dictionaries. ISO/IEC 11179-5:2005 defines "representation term" as a "designation of an instance of a representation class" As used in ISO/IEC 11179, the representation term is that part of a data element name that provides a semantic pointer to the underlying data type. A "Representation class" is a class of representations. This "representation class" provides a way to classify or group data elements.