The Same Word Means Something Different Depending on Who Said It
We kept running into the same situation on calls. A business owner would be three sentences into a question, and we'd realize partway through that we were not talking about the same thing. Not because anyone was confused. Because the word they used means something specific in their world, and something completely different in ours.
"Token" is the one that comes up the most. To a business owner, a token is a login credential, the thing you hand to a user to prove they belong. To an AI developer, a token is roughly three-quarters of a word, and it's the unit your bill is calculated in. Ask a developer "what's our token limit?" expecting to hear how many users can access the system, and you'll get an answer about API billing that doesn't connect to anything you asked.
"Role" has the same problem. In your company, a role is a job: admin, manager, read-only user. In a database, a role is a completely separate concept: a database identity with its own permission set, unrelated to what the person does at the company. A developer talking about "role-level security" is not talking about your org chart.
"Client" is worse, because it's in every conversation and it usually switches meanings mid-sentence. You say client, you mean the company paying the invoice. A developer says client-side, they mean the user's browser, because that's what the code is running on.
Why This Matters
This isn't a terminology trivia problem. When a word means something different on each side of the conversation, approvals happen on the wrong assumption, scope gets misread, and someone ends up frustrated that they didn't get what they thought they asked for.
We built a glossary to address it. Seventy-six terms and acronyms, written for owners of service businesses who sit in technical conversations and need to participate without getting tripped up by the vocabulary.
How We Structured Each Entry
Standard glossaries give you the definition. We gave that plus two more fields.
The first is why the thing exists: the problem that existed before this term was invented. Retrieval-augmented generation sounds obscure until you know why it exists, which is that documents don't fit inside a prompt window. Once you understand the constraint it was invented to solve, the name makes sense.
The second is where you'll actually hear it: the specific context where the term shows up in a real business conversation. A developer saying "I'll build you an endpoint for that" means one new, narrow capability, usually hours not weeks. Knowing that changes how you respond to the estimate.
Why It's Free
We debated putting a form in front of it. The argument against was simple: a business owner searching "what does RAG mean" or "what is an API" is exactly the kind of person we want finding our site. A gate on a reference resource is a gate on the people most likely to need what we build.
The glossary is ungated and always will be. If it helps someone walk into a vendor meeting with a sharper vocabulary, that's enough. If it's the reason they later call us, that's a good outcome too.
One clear term in a meeting is worth more than an hour of nodding along.