Glossary
Who this is for: anyone who has hit a word on this site and wanted to know exactly what it means here. Terms are defined as this guide uses them, which is not always how the rest of the internet uses them. Last updated: 2026-08-30
Contents
Places and geography
Barrier island The strip of sand Ocean City sits on: ocean on one side, bay on the other, ten miles long and a few blocks wide. It is why the whole town is organised as one line.
Coastal Highway The road that runs the length of the island, and the guide's spine — the axis everything else is positioned along.
Spine The guide's word for a place's main axis. Here it is Coastal Highway, running south to north. A place's position on the spine is what makes "how far is that" answerable.
Street ordinal A place's position along the island, counted south to north from the Inlet. It is why the guide can tell you something is twelve blocks away without needing your GPS.
District One of eight areas the guide divides the town into. Seven are stretches of the island or the mainland; the eighth is the day-trips ring.
| District | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Downtown / Inlet & Boardwalk | Inlet to 15th St |
| Lower Midtown | 15th to 33rd St |
| Midtown | 33rd to 62nd St |
| Uptown | 62nd to 94th St |
| North OC | 94th to 146th St |
| West Ocean City | The Rt. 50 corridor and the harbour, off-island |
| Fenwick Island, DE | Over the Delaware line |
| Day-trips ring | Assateague, Berlin, Ocean Pines, Ocean Downs |
Home base The street you tell the guide you are staying on. It is a choice from a list, never your device's location, and it turns every distance in the guide into walking minutes from you.
Side of island How locals actually place things: oceanfront, bayside, boardwalk, inland or harbor. More useful than a street address for knowing which way to walk.
The Boardwalk The wooden strip from the Inlet to 27th Street. Capitalised, because there is only one.
Off-island West Ocean City, Berlin, Assateague and the rest — reachable, but not walkable from a hotel on the island. Places off-island get distances rather than walk times.
The guide's own words
Beat A news section. The guide runs five: Open & Shut (a place opened, closed or moved), Town Notebook (Mayor and Council decisions), Season Marks (the dates the town turns on and off), Fest Desk (the big weekends) and From the Archive (history, published when the anniversary lands).
Season Here this means summer, offseason or holiday — not spring/summer/fall/winter. A resort that empties in October does not have four seasons; it has an on and an off, plus the holiday weekends that behave like neither.
Season hours Opening hours scoped to a season — "Daily 11am–1am, summer". They do not go stale, which is why they are what the guide shows you offline, where "open now" would be a lie.
Tier How much of the guide a place earns: landmark (always worth a pin), notable (named on district views), standard (in the listings and the search). An editorial judgement, not a rating.
Answer card A short written answer to a narrow question — "where can I park for free" — rather than a filtered list you have to work through.
Trip Your pinned places, arranged into days. Lives in your browser. Shareable as a link that contains the whole plan.
Offline pack What the guide keeps readable with no connection: your trip, recently-read pages, your district, and search.
History
Era A named span of the town's history. The guide holds 19.
Thread A story told across decades rather than a page about one thing — the storms, the fires, the building of the place. The guide holds 8, each drawing on dated facts from across the archive.
Year-fact One dated, sourced claim about the town. The archive holds 2,401 of them, and they are what the timeline, the threads and the trivia are all built from.
The Record The history written as narrative chapters, in prose, rather than as records.
Knowledge graph The whole archive as connections instead of pages — people to places to eras to events. Useful if you would rather see how things relate than read them in order.
The game
Sand Dollars The guide's score. Earned from trivia, check-ins, badges and stamps. They buy nothing — there is no purchase anywhere in this guide.
Gull-dex The field guide to the gulls, as a collection. Includes the winter-only rarities, and several deliberate gotchas: some birds people call seagulls are terns or pelicans.
Check-in Marking that you were somewhere. Earns Sand Dollars and fills in your record.
Badge / stamp Awards for doing a set of things — visiting a whole district, finishing a tour.
Trust and sourcing
Provenance Where a claim came from, when it was last checked, and how confident the guide is in it. Every record carries it.
Source line The line at the foot of a fact linking to where it came from. If a record has no source, the guide shows no source line rather than an empty one.
Confidence How well-established a claim is. An item marked unverified that also rests on someone else's reporting carries a line saying so — which is why you can trust the items that do not.
Correction A published change to something the guide got wrong. Corrections are appended and dated, never applied silently.
Editorial firewall The rule that certain categories cannot be advertised against at all — accessibility, safety, heritage and emergency information. It is enforced in the code: there is no label for those categories in the advertising system, so nothing can be sold that cannot be named.