Convention for inline glossary definitions?

Question

Does anyone know if there is a convention for including inline definitions of words within HTML text?

I've made a documentation platform. It auto-generates glossaries, but I also want the user to have the option of having terms from the glossary definable inline, as the user reads, so they don't have to jump to the glossary page.

Possibilities:

• transperambulation (?)
• transperambulation [DEF]
• transperambulation [def.]
• transperambulation (nothing after the word, but the word itself underlined with dotted border)

It would need to be a hover (tooltip) effect as the word may also be a link, so clicking it is reserved for the link target.

Or is this a bad idea in general?

Answer 1

what about the abbr tag? it uses the title attr with a dotted underline http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_abbr.asp

i would use that