diff --git a/spacy/default_config.cfg b/spacy/default_config.cfg
index ceb7357fc..86a72926e 100644
--- a/spacy/default_config.cfg
+++ b/spacy/default_config.cfg
@@ -68,12 +68,14 @@ seed = ${system.seed}
 gpu_allocator = ${system.gpu_allocator}
 dropout = 0.1
 accumulate_gradient = 1
-# Controls early-stopping. 0 disables early stopping.
+# Controls early-stopping, i.e., the number of steps to continue without
+# improvement before stopping. 0 disables early stopping.
 patience = 1600
 # Number of epochs. 0 means unlimited. If >= 0, train corpus is loaded once in
 # memory and shuffled within the training loop. -1 means stream train corpus
 # rather than loading in memory with no shuffling within the training loop.
 max_epochs = 0
+# Maximum number of update steps to train for. 0 means an unlimited number of steps.
 max_steps = 20000
 eval_frequency = 200
 # Control how scores are printed and checkpoints are evaluated.