Words Explained

Every beat has its own vocabulary, and a weekly that moves between streaming, AI, small business and money picks up a lot of it. This page collects the terms that come up most often in our articles, each explained in a sentence or two, with a link to a piece that goes further where we have one.

Screens and streaming

• IPTV – television delivered over an internet connection instead of an aerial, satellite dish or cable. Our beginner's glossary for IPTV covers the related jargon in detail.
• Buffering – the pause while a player loads enough video to keep playing smoothly. It usually points to a slow or unstable connection somewhere between the server and the screen.
• VPN – a virtual private network, which routes your traffic through an encrypted connection to another server. It can add privacy on public networks; it does not change what a service's terms allow.
• Fibre and 5G – two ways of delivering fast internet: cables carrying light to the building, and the newer generation of mobile networks.

Everyday computing

• Browser cache – stored copies of images and files from websites, kept to speed up later visits. When it holds stale files, clearing the cache often fixes the page.
• Cookie – a small piece of data a website asks your browser to keep, often to remember a login or a preference.
• Local storage – a storage area in the browser that a site can use to remember simple settings on your device.
• CSV file – a plain text file in which values are separated by commas, which most spreadsheet programs can open.

AI and new tech

• Large language model – software trained on large amounts of text to predict and generate language.
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) – a method that lets an AI model look up relevant documents before answering, so responses can draw on specific, current sources. See our explainer on RAG.
• Automated trading – buying and selling by software that follows preset rules rather than by a person placing each order.

Business and marketing

• Local SEO – the work of helping a business appear in searches with a place attached, such as a service plus a town name.
• Backlink – a link from another website to yours, one of many signals search engines look at.
• Due diligence – the checks you carry out before committing to a deal, a partner or a purchase.

Money, property and law

• Compound interest – interest earned on earlier interest as well as on the original amount, so growth builds on itself over time.
• Variable rate – a rate that can rise or fall during the life of an account or loan, usually following wider interest rates.
• Bridging loan – short-term borrowing that covers a gap, typically between buying one property and selling another. Our piece on bridging loans for broken property chains explains the trade-offs.
• Property chain – a linked series of sales in which each purchase depends on another sale going through.
• Work injury compensation – a scheme that pays employees who are hurt at work, with rules set by each country.

Missing a term you met on the site? Send it to us via Reach Us and we will consider adding it here.