Glosses, which are similar to our modern footnotes, are commonly seen in the margins of medieval manuscripts. According to Clemens and Graham, glosses were not usually readers' notes in the margins of a manuscript, but were usually copied from the exemplar with the text. Scribes would sometimes get the text and glosses from the same exemplar, or they may get the text from one exemplar and the glosses from another. Glosses could be as simple as an explanation of a word, offering a definition, a synonym, or a translated version. For instance, in Chaucer's Ellesmere manuscript, some Latin glosses are added to the English text for clarification. This type of gloss was called a lexical gloss.Another category of glosses was called a suppletive gloss. Suppletive glosses added more information to the text, like background on a topic or explanation of a phrase. These were connected to the text using signes-de-renvoi and were normally written in the margins. However, occasionally a scribe would write the glosses in where they applied to the text, so a signe-de-renvoi would be unnecessary. When copying out a text, scribes occasionally misconstrued a gloss for a correction, and included the gloss in the text, omitting the actual correct phrase.Glosses could also be contained in their own separate manuscript.Glossing became so complex by the end of the Middle Ages that pages began to be ruled to contain glossing, which was sometimes longer than the text itself.