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A solid black bar over text that has been withheld.
Also known as: Blacked out text, Black bar over words, Redacted
A block covering words removed before release. Its honesty is structural: the bar shows that something was withheld and roughly how much, which an unmarked deletion would not — and its failures are among the best-documented mistakes in document handling.
A solid block, conventionally black, covering text withheld from a released document.
A record about how a reference is written, not about what the law says. Nothing here is legal advice.
Visible by design. Marking the withholding, and its extent, is what distinguishes a redaction from a silent edit, and it is what lets a reader know the document is incomplete.
Notoriously easy to do wrongly in electronic documents, where drawing a black rectangle over text leaves the text in the file underneath it. Genuine redaction removes the content rather than covering it.
A repeatedly documented failure in released public documents. A black bar is not evidence that anything was removed.
A solid filled rectangle the height of a line of type, covering one or more words and leaving the surrounding text visible.