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Stop-Words In Spacy

This article describes stop-words in Spacy.

What Are Stop Words?

Stop words are the common words in a language that typically do not convey much meaning and are often removed during preprocessing. Examples of English stop words are a, an, the, in, on, is, was, are, am, be, by, of, with, and, but, or, not, so, too.

Example

import spacy
from spacy.lang.en.stop_words import STOP_WORDS

# Convert set → sorted list
stop_words_list = sorted(list(STOP_WORDS))

# Print top 10 stop words
print(stop_words_list[:10])

Output

How To Add And Remove The Stop Word From The Spacy Stop Word List?

To add a stop word, we use the add method followed by setting the is_stop attribute to true. Similarly, to remove the stop word, we use the remove method followed by setting the is_stop attribute to false.

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")

print("Before adding apple in stop words:", nlp.vocab["apple"].is_stop);

nlp.Defaults.stop_words.add("apple")
nlp.vocab["apple"].is_stop = True

print("After adding apple in stop words:", nlp.vocab["apple"].is_stop);

nlp.Defaults.stop_words.remove("apple")
nlp.vocab["apple"].is_stop = False

print("After removing apple in stop words:", nlp.vocab["apple"].is_stop);

Output

Picture showing how to add and remove stops words in spacy

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Tuesday, November 25, 2025

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