prompting

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Verbal persuasion, encouragement, or reminders used to get someone to speak or act.

   After some gentle prompting from his teacher, the student finally raised his hand.

   The witness recalled the events without any prompting from the lawyers.

   Similarencouragement, coaxing, persuasion, nudging

   Oppositediscouragement

   Note

   The plural turns this sense inward: promptings can come from within rather than from another person, as when Kevin Hinckley's Promptings Or Me? (2011) sets "the promptings of the Spirit" against "the pressures of our own thoughts and desires." The singular stays uncountable for the nudge itself (gentle prompting, without any prompting), while promptings names separate impulses a person notices and must learn to tell apart.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of prompt.

   The director was prompting the actors from the wings whenever they forgot their lines.

   By prompting the witness repeatedly, the lawyer drew out the full account.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs: the -ing form is the participle in "was prompting the actors" and the gerund in "by prompting the witness." Every sense of the verb behind it is transitive, so both uses normally carry a direct object: the actor, the user, the language model. Drop the object, or make it plural as promptings, and the word has crossed into the noun of encouragement.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act of giving text instructions to an artificial intelligence system to guide it toward a desired response.

   Like phrasing a request to a search engine carefully so it returns exactly what you want.

   Effective prompting often involves giving the model clear examples to follow.

   The team improved their results through careful prompting of the language model.

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