# Prompt

> A prompt is the complete input text, and optionally other media, that is given to a language model to condition its output, including instructions, context, examples, and the user's request.

- Identifier: PTL-0001
- Category: Foundations
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/prompt/
- Also known as: input, context

## Description

In chat-based systems the prompt is assembled from several parts, such as a system prompt, the prior conversation turns, retrieved documents, and tool results. The model produces its output by predicting tokens conditioned on this entire input, so every part of the prompt can influence the response, not only the final question.

## Narrower terms

- [System Prompt](https://protologue.com/t/system-prompt/)
- [Prompt Template](https://protologue.com/t/prompt-template/)

## Related terms

- [Context Window](https://protologue.com/t/context-window/)
- [Context Engineering](https://protologue.com/t/context-engineering/)

## Sources

- Brown et al. (2020). Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
- Schulhoff et al. (2024). The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Prompt. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0001). https://protologue.com/t/prompt/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)