(1) A unit of information to be processed.
(2) In COBOL, a character or a set of consecutive characters (excluding literals in either case) defined as a unit of data by the COBOL program.
(3) In EGL, an area of memory that is not in a structure and is based either on a data item part or on an explicit primitive-type description such as CHAR(3).
(4) In the MQAI, an item contained within a data bag. This can be an integer item or a character-string item, and a user item or a system item.