The glossaries package supports acronyms and multiple glossaries, and has provision for operation in several languages (using the facilities of either babel or polyglossia). New entries are defined to have a name and description (and optionally an associated symbol). Support for multiple languages is offered, and plural forms of terms may be specified. An additional package, glossaries-accsupp, can make use of the accsupp package mechanisms for accessibility support for PDF files containing glossaries.

The user may define new glossary styles, and preambles and postambles can be specified. There is provision for loading a database of terms, but only terms used in the text will be added to the relevant glossary.

The package uses an indexing program to provide the actual glossary; either makeindex or xindy may serve this purpose, and a Perl script is provided to serve as interface.

The package distribution also provides the mfirstuc package, for changing the first letter of a word to upper case.

The package supersedes the author‘s glossary package (which is now obsolete), and a conversion tool is provided.