A notebook is a book of blank or lined pages bound together, used for writing notes, ideas, drawings, or anything else you want to record. Students carry notebooks to class for taking notes during lessons. Scientists use notebooks to record observations and sketch diagrams. Writers fill notebooks with story ideas and character descriptions.

Notebooks come in many forms: spiral-bound with metal coils, composition notebooks with sewn bindings, or simple stapled booklets. Some have graph paper for math, others have blank pages for sketching. The key feature is that a notebook gives you a portable, organized place to capture your thoughts and information.

The word can also refer to laptop computers, which are small, portable computers you can carry like a notebook. When someone says “I'll bring my notebook to the meeting,” they might mean either kind.

People can develop personal relationships with their notebooks. A scientist might have shelves of old notebooks documenting years of experiments. A student might look back at last year's notebook and see how much they've learned. Unlike loose papers that get lost, a notebook keeps everything together in one place, creating a record of your thinking and learning over time.