While glossarys are usually limited to component or section boundaries, appearing at the end of a book or chapter, for instance, glosslists can appear anywhere that the other list types are allowed.

Using a glosslist in running text, instead of a variablelist, for example, maintains the semantic distinction of a glossary. This distinction may be necessary if you want to automatically point to the members of the list with glossterms in the body of the text.

<article xmlns='http://docbook.org/ns/docbook'>
<title>Example glosslist</title>

<glosslist>
<glossentry><glossterm>C</glossterm>
<glossdef>
<para>A procedural programming language invented by K&amp;R.
</para>
</glossdef>
</glossentry>
<glossentry><glossterm>Pascal</glossterm>
<glossdef>
<para>A procedural programming language invented by Niklaus Wirth.
</para>
</glossdef>
</glossentry>
</glosslist>

</article>