Help

Glossary

Words this guide uses on purpose, and what each one commits us to. Several of them look like ordinary words and are not — "open", "verified" and "unconfirmed" all mean something narrower here than they do in conversation, and knowing which is which is most of learning to read the site.

Updated: 2026-08-20

Contents

Places and coverage

Place record — one entry in the guide's directory, with a permanent address of the form /poi/<slug>. There are 346. Not all of them are places you can go, and not all of them have a page.

Published — a record with a page you can open. 343 of the 346.

Unconfirmed — a record the guide holds but will not stand behind yet. It has no page anywhere. Three records are in this state, and the Register counts them as withheld.

Site-only — the record is a location, not a business: the building is gone and the guide is telling you what stood there. Eight records. They lose Directions, hours, price and check-in, and gain a "Lost Charlotte" line.

History record — the shorthand for the 14 records that are permanently closed (6) or site-only (8) taken together. They are the ones treated as history rather than as destinations.

Slug — the last part of a URL: noda-brewing-company in /poi/noda-brewing-company. Slugs are permanent. Where two records were merged, the retired slug redirects.

One-liner — the single sentence saying what a place is, in the hero of its page. Every one of the 346 records has one.

The take — the guide's editorial paragraph about a place, in the local-friend voice. 249 records carry one; the rest have no such section rather than a placeholder. It is deliberately never mixed with the checked facts, and it never opens by repeating the one-liner.

Deep cut — a researched, sourced extra fact that did not fit a place's main description. 38 records have one. Today it appears as a badge in search results and in the plain-text version of a page, but not yet on the place page itself.

The Register — the sortable table at the foot of /places, one line per place, with columns for tier, price, hours, deals and opening year. It is the guide's coverage ledger printed as itself: most cells are em-dashes, and its footer tallies the gaps out loud rather than hiding them.

Tier — how much of a landmark a place is, in three steps: landmark, notable, standard. It affects ordering, never whether something is listed.

Time, hours and the word "open"

Structured hours — a real posted week, day by day, open and close. 28 records have this, and it is the only thing that can produce a live "Open now" chip.

Prose hours — hours as a sentence rather than a table. 90 records. Enough to read, not enough to compute from, so no chip.

Lifecycle status — what has happened to the business: open, seasonal, temporarily closed, permanently closed, site-only, unconfirmed.

Seasonal calendar — a separate, sparser field saying what a place does across the year. Only 213 records say anything definite in it. This is where the home page's "212 places open" comes from, and it is a fact about the year, not about this minute.

Open now — reserved. It appears only when structured hours support it, and never as an inference from a season or a category. When you do not see it, the guide is not claiming a place is shut; it is declining to claim it is open.

Charlotte's clock — America/New_York. Every time and every day boundary on the site uses it, never your device's and never the server's. This is why a streak can roll over while it is still yesterday where you are.

Walk time — an estimate from coordinates, always marked as an estimate. The guide has no routing engine and no car directions, which is why every travel sentence in the planner contains the word walk.

Geography

Neighborhood (also district) — one of the guide's 22 groupings of the city. Some are the city's own names (NoDa, Dilworth, South End); some are the guide's composites (Steele Creek & Whitewater, Matthews & Mint Hill, LoSo & South Boulevard).

Arrival page — a neighborhood's page at /districts/<slug>, built to answer one question: I just checked in near here — what's my first hour?

The haze — the soft tinted field drawn on a neighborhood map. It has no edge, because an edge would be a claim the guide cannot back. Its caption states its ground radius and says in words that it marks where the places sit, not a boundary.

Day trips — a neighborhood like any other, holding the 32 places an hour outside the city: the Speedway, the lake, the mountains. It has a real arrival page and is deliberately outside the drawn map frame, which is why the home map counts 311 places and 21 neighbourhoods rather than 343 and 22.

City limits — the one boundary the guide does draw, because it is a published municipal fact.

The rail

LYNX Blue Line — the light rail. 26 stations, 19.3 miles, UNC Charlotte to I-485, north–south. Its stops are called stations, throughout.

CityLYNX Gold Line — the streetcar. 17 platforms, 4.0 miles, French Street to Sunnyside Avenue, west–east. Its stops are called platforms, throughout. The difference in wording follows the data; it is not an inconsistency.

Walkshed — everything within a half-mile, about a ten-minute walk, of a stop. It is the rule that decides what counts as "on the line". Each place lands at exactly one stop, its nearest, even though walksheds overlap on the ground.

On the corridor — the honest label for a stop that sits outside every guide neighborhood. Three Gold Line platforms are like this: French Street, Johnson C. Smith University and Bruns Avenue.

The CTC — the Charlotte Transportation Center, where the two lines meet. Each ride page carries "Change here for the Gold Line" (or the Blue) linking to the same stop on the other page, derived from a symmetric link so the two sides cannot disagree.

Scheduled vs running time — two different hedges, always printed. Scheduled means a published timetable stands behind the number. Running time means it is arithmetic over the stop times in the feed, with no departure grid behind it.

Sources and confidence

Provenance — the block attached to a fact: where it came from, the date a person checked it, and how confident the guide is. It is attached to the fact, not to the page, so two facts side by side can carry different sources and different confidence.

Verified — checked against a source that stands up. 441 of the 677 history facts. It carries no badge, because it is the unremarkable default.

Unverified — "sourced but not confirmed against a primary record". 236 facts. The words are printed on the facts they are true of, so their presence carries information.

Conflict — a recorded disagreement between credible sources, published rather than resolved silently. 51 facts carry one. Each competing claim keeps its own source.

Published hedge — the wording the guide uses while a conflict is unsettled, so the sentence you read is honest about the dispute rather than picking a side.

The Colophon — /colophon: the method in plain language, plus the complete bibliography, which is generated from the research itself rather than hand-maintained. Cite a new source anywhere in the dataset and it appears there on the next build.

Corrections register — /news/corrections: every published correction to the news layer, newest first, each linked to the item it corrects. The stated policy is that a published item is never silently edited. It covers the news layer only.

The history archive

Fact — one dated row in the archive: a year, a headline, a detail, a lens, its cross-references, and its own provenance. There are 677, spanning 1540–2025 across 204 distinct years.

Era — a named stretch of time. Sixteen of them, from The Catawba Crossroads (1500–1754) to Queen City Now (2019–). Eras are structure, not destinations: they appear as lanes on the timeline, as headings, and as nodes in the graph.

Thread — an argument, not a topic: one claim followed from the year it starts to the year it stops, with the evidence in order. Eight of them, 55 beats between them.

Beat — one moment in a thread's arc: a year or a run of years, a title, and a paragraph. Two per thread are marked pivotal, in words as well as in styling.

Evidence gap — a section every thread ends with, headed What we still cannot show: what could not be established, the years it covers, and which archive would settle it. Twenty across the archive. A history with no visible gaps is either finished or lying.

The Core Sample — the instrument at /history/timeline: the record drawn as a geologist's drill core stood on end, with a draggable brush. Beneath it, always, is the complete record as text.

Brush — the range you have swept on the Core Sample. ?brush=1799-1861 is the canonical deep link. The older ?year=1799 form still works and opens the decade around that year.

Semantic zoom — the reading pane changing its unit as your brush widens: facts, then years, then decades, then centuries. The unit gets coarser, not smaller.

The Prose Record — /history/record: the same research written as twelve narrative chapters. Each names the exact records its prose rests on, which is both the claim-to-record trace and what generates its exit links.

The plates — the site's drawn data figures, each with a Roman numeral and a name (The Core Sample, The Assay, The Register). They are gathered at /atlas. Every one has a real text equivalent underneath it.

Finding and planning

Intent parsing — the search box reading your phrase as constraints rather than only matching letters. It always shows its reading back to you as chips, because a search that silently reinterprets you is worse than one that does nothing.

"Reading that as" — the chip row under the search box showing exactly that reading. If the chips are wrong, rephrase.

Recovery panel — what a zero-result search shows instead of a shrug: loosened versions of your query, each of which was run for real before it was offered, with its true count.

Home base — the station you told the guide you are staying near. It re-sorts flat lists by walking distance and gently floats nearby results up. It is never a filter, it needs no account, and the guide never asks your browser where you are.

Starter day — the real upcoming Saturday, with three genuine Blue Line stops on it, that /trip opens on instead of a blank form. It is never written to your device until you touch something.

Meal slot — one of four per day (breakfast, lunch, dinner, evening treat). It holds either a place from the guide or your own words, never both — freeform text is rendered as your words, with no link, no hours and no walk time, because it is not a venue.

Split day — two stops given different group labels ("Dad + son", "Mom + the girls"), laid out as parallel lanes. Stops in different groups may overlap without complaint; an unlabelled stop is the whole party and conflicts with everything.

Offline pack — the snapshot of your pinned places written to your own device, readable at /offline with no signal. It prints the date it was taken and deliberately carries no live open/closed claim.

Playing

Cabinet — one game in the arcade at /games. Seven of them.

Streak — consecutive days you actually played, on Charlotte's clock. Never seeded, and there are no freezes, grace days or repair purchases.

Mint Coins — the cosmetic currency. Cannot be bought, cannot be redeemed, nothing to spend them on. Your browser files the balance under an older name, clt-sand-dollars, inherited from the first city in this network.

Badge — a one-time award for finishing something, recorded with the time you earned it.

Season — a calendar year, January to January. The leaderboard's rank resets so a completionist from an earlier year does not sit on top forever. The reset is to rank only — the ledger keeps everything, and the all-time record is every year summed.