The geocaching glossary, decoded

People and places

Muggle: a person who does not geocache. Borrowed from the Harry Potter books and used without malice. In practice it appears as a warning: muggles about means wait before you retrieve anything.

Muggled: a cache found and taken, moved or destroyed by a non-cacher. The most common cause of a missing container in an urban setting, and one reason container choice and placement matter more than concealment.

Coordinates: a position written as degrees and decimal minutes, N 51° 28.123 W 000° 00.456. Maps and datasets normally use one of two other formats, which is what the converter is for.

Ground zero: the spot your device says the coordinates are. Often abbreviated GZ. Distinct from where the cache actually is, which is the subject of an entire page on phone GPS accuracy.

Reviewer: a volunteer who checks a submitted cache against the guidelines before it is published. Not an employee of the listing service and not an author of the rules; they apply them. How that process works has its own page.

Logs and finding

DNF: Did Not Find. A log type. Worth writing rather than skipping.

FTF: First To Find. Being first to sign a new cache. STF and TTF follow for second and third, mostly in communities where the race is taken seriously.

TFTC: Thanks For The Cache. The four-letter log. Technically a log; barely a message.

Found it / Write note: the two other common log types. A write note records a visit that is not a find: a maintenance trip, a failed attempt you do not want to log as a DNF, or an observation.

Signal drift: your position wandering while you stand still, usually under tree cover or beside buildings.

The container and its contents

Swag: the small trade items in a larger cache. The convention is trade equal or trade up, and swag matters far more to children than to adults.

Trackable: an item with a unique code that moves from cache to cache and accumulates a travel history. Travel bug and geocoin are the two common forms. They are not swag and must not be kept, the trackables section covers where they stall and what keeps one moving.

Logbook / log sheet: what you sign. A logbook in a larger container, a rolled strip in a micro.

Micro / nano: size classifications. A nano is often smaller than a thumbnail and is where a great deal of the community’s frustration is concentrated.

CITO: Cache In Trash Out: collecting litter while caching, and the name of the event type built around it.

Listings and status

Attributes: the icons on a listing indicating things like available parking, suitability for children, whether it is accessible in winter, whether a torch is needed. Chronically under-read; they answer most of the questions people ask in logs, and the cache types page explains which two to check every time.

Archived: permanently retired. The listing stays for the record; the cache is done.

Disabled: temporarily paused by the owner, usually for maintenance. It will likely come back.

Needs maintenance / Needs archived: flags a finder can raise to tell the owner and the reviewer that something is wrong.

Pocket query: a saved, filtered set of caches you can download in advance. The mechanism most people use to prepare for a day away from a signal.

GSAK: Geocaching Swiss Army Knife, long-standing third-party software for managing large collections of cache data offline. It appears constantly in older writing about the hobby.

Cache mechanics

Stage: an intermediate point in a multi-cache. A broken stage strands everybody behind it.

Final: the last container in a multi or mystery cache, as opposed to the posted coordinates.

Checker: a tool that confirms whether your solved coordinates or your qualification for a challenge are correct, before you travel.

Power trail: a long series of closely spaced caches designed to be found quickly. Contested, and covered in the numbers section.

Waypoint: any recorded coordinate: the cache itself, a parking spot, a trailhead, a stage. Additional waypoints on a listing are usually the most useful and least read part of it.

Why the language is this dense

Every hobby develops shorthand, and caching has more of it than most for a specific reason: almost all communication happens in writing, in small boxes, between strangers.

A log field, a hint field and a container the size of a thumb do not reward long sentences. Under that pressure the vocabulary compressed: four-letter acknowledgements, initialisms for the states a cache can be in, single words for concepts that would otherwise take a clause. None of it was designed. It accreted because it was efficient, and it stayed because everybody already knew it.

The consequence is that the barrier to a newcomer is not the activity, which takes ten minutes to explain. It is that the listings and logs describing the activity read as though written in code. This page exists because nobody in the community has any reason to define these terms. They are invisible to the people who use them.

Terms that mean different things in different places

A few entries above are not universal, and assuming they are causes genuine confusion when reading material from elsewhere.

Muggle is near-universal in English-speaking communities and is often replaced locally — German cachers commonly say Muggel, and several communities use their own word entirely.

Cache sizes carry the same names everywhere and are applied differently. What counts as a small in one country is routinely listed as a micro in another, and travellers should read the size as an approximation rather than a specification.

Event vocabulary is the most local of all. The names for meet-ups, their conventions and what is expected of attendees vary by country, and a term used confidently in one national forum may be unknown in the next.

Where a term on this page is specific to English-language caching, it is marked as such. Where it is genuinely universal, it is because the software uses it.