Prompting glossary
Output format
The shape you want the answer in.
What it means
Output format tells the model whether you want a table, a bulleted list, an email, a script with timestamps or plain paragraphs. Stating it removes most of the reformatting work people do by hand afterwards.
How to use this in practice
Knowing the word is the easy half. The useful half is writing the instruction so the AI does not have to guess: say who it should act as, give it the background it cannot know, state the outcome you want, set the limits, and name the format the answer should come back in. That is the same structure behind every template in the free prompt library.
Want prompts written for your business instead of definitions?