ISO 10241-1:2011 specifies requirements for the drafting and structuring of terminological entries in standards, exemplified by terminological entries in ISO and IEC documents. Terms and other designations occurring in terminological entries can include letters, numerals, mathematical symbols, typographical signs and syntactic signs (e.g. punctuation marks, hyphens, parentheses, square brackets and other connectors or delimiters), sometimes in character styles (i.e. fonts and bold, italic, bold italic or other style conventions) governed by language-, domain- or subject-specific conventions. Terms can also include standardized symbols (which can be language independent or internationally harmonized, such as symbols for quantities and units as well as graphical symbols) which are under the responsibility of different committees in ISO and IEC.

ISO 10241-1:2011 is based on the principles and methods given in ISO 704 and provides rules for both monolingual and multilingual terminological entries in standards and their indexes.

ISO 10241-1:2011 is applicable to all standards that contain terminological entries. It does not deal with the administrative procedures nor the technical specifications required by standardizing bodies for the preparation of terminology standards.

Since presentation and layout rules by nature are very much tied to the script and to the publishing rules of the standardizing body, they are dealt with only on an abstract level in ISO 10241-1:2011. Examples and rules for a typical layout and presentation in ISO documents are provided for information in Annex A.