Glossary (noun):
An alphabetical list of words relating to a specific subject, text, or dialect, with explanations; a brief dictionary.

Don't we just love naming things? Well, it's more like a love/hate relationship. We know that naming things in the design and development space is hard, yet we do it anyway. Design systems are no different. Thankfully, there are enough clever people out there who have created a glossary of terminology that you'll find commonly when people are talking about design systems.

Glossary
Glossary explains key Design System concepts and terms with clear descriptions, providing links to directories and components database, along with practical guidelines to enhance understanding and usage
Design System Glossary
Design systems can be tricky if you don’t know what certain words mean! Here’s a quick primer to help you get acclimated.
Glossary – Material Design 3
Get to know key Material terms and concepts, from A to Z.
Material Design
Design Systems 101
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.
Nielsen Norman GroupTherese Fessenden

This was sparked by a discussion over in the Design Systems community Slack (you should totally come on in to chat). I will say, though, that some definitions are missing. For example, none of them mention Primitive or semantic design tokens.

Primitive and Semantic Tokens

If you were wondering, primitive tokens are the final values stored against a broadly named token key. Semantic tokens are literally a more practical name that you would use in your components (code or design). The idea is that the semantic token is wired up to the primitive, creating an additional abstraction layer.

So, a very basic example would be #ff0000 (red) is stored as a primitive called color.red500, and in turn, a semantic token called color.text.error would be wired up to color.red500.

You can see how things can get complex pretty quickly, but there is value in splitting these apart, as people working on tokens can make improvements without causing major breakages in code or design files.