Why this matters: Prompt engineering has moved from trial-and-error to a disciplined engineering practice. Whether you are writing system prompts, designing chain-of-thought pipelines, tuning sampling parameters, or defending against prompt injection, you need precise vocabulary to collaborate and communicate effectively.

Key prompt engineering vocabulary

Prompt structure

  • "The system prompt sets the assistant's persona and constraints."
  • "We use few-shot examples to steer output format reliably."
  • "Adding chain-of-thought improved reasoning accuracy by 18%."

Sampling & chaining

  • "Lower temperature gives more deterministic, consistent outputs."
  • "We decomposed the task using a prompt chain with three steps."
  • "The map-reduce prompt pattern handles long documents in chunks."

Security & testing

  • "Our input pipeline includes prompt injection detection."
  • "We run a prompt regression suite on every model update."
  • "Jailbreak attempts are logged and reviewed by the safety team."