placeholder

From place +‎ holder.

placeholder (plural placeholders)

Something used or included temporarily or as a substitute for something that is not known or must remain generic; that which holds, denotes or reserves a place for something to come later.
This data is a placeholder, so you'll want to include the real numbers as soon as you have them.
- 2007 August 24, William Grimes, “Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers”, in The New York Times‎, archived from the original on 4 January 2013:
  As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er.
- 2013 February 14, Scott Tobias, “A Good Day To Die Hard [film review]”, in The AV Club‎, archived from the original on 10 March 2016:
  "I'm on vacation," [Bruce] Willis grumbles several times throughout A Good Day To Die Hard, in what counts as the film's sole running joke, a lame placeholder until he arrives at the big "yippee-ki-yay" punchline.
(graphical user interface) A non-editable caption initially displayed in a blank text box to indicate its function.

that which holds, denotes or reserves a place for something to come later

Arabic: العُنْصُرُ النَّائِب m (al-ʕunṣuru n-nāʔib), ^{(please verify)} حَيِّز m (ḥayyiz)
Dutch: plaatshouder m, invul- (nl), vulsel (nl) n, vulling (nl) f
Finnish: paikkamerkki
French: marque substitutive (fr) f, substitut (fr) m, placeholder (fr) m (anglicism)
German: Platzhalter (de) m
Hungarian: (in general) helyettesítő (hu), pótlék (hu), (as a term in computer science) helykitöltő, helyőrző
Italian: segnaposto (it) m, simbolo (it) m, sostituto (it) m, variabile (it) f, tal dei tali m
Macedonian: пополнувач m (popolnuvač), резервирано место n (rezervirano mesto)
Maori: puri tūranga
Norwegian: plassholder m
Polish: zamiennik (pl) m, symbol zastępczy m
Portuguese: calhau (pt)
Russian: заполни́тель (ru) m (zapolnítelʹ), ры́ба (ru) f (rýba)
Spanish: marcador (es) m
Swedish: platshållare (sv) c
Welsh: dalfan

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