<commit_before>---
navhome: '/docs'
next: True
sort: 3
title: Urbit glossary
---

# Urbit glossary

Urbit is renowned for its exotic terminology. Here's a simple overview
from the strange words in.

As Dijkstra put it: "The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but
to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."

## Ships

An Urbit `shdip` is a cryptographic title on a `will` signed by private 
key , a human-memorable name, and a packet routing address. Ships are 
classed by the number of bits in their address:

    Size   Name    Parent  Object      Example
    -----  ------  ------  ------      -------<commit_msg>Update glossary.md<commit_after>---
navhome: '/docs'
next: True
sort: 3
title: Urbit glossary
---

# Urbit glossary

Urbit is renowned for its exotic terminology. Here's a simple overview
from the strange words in.

As Dijkstra put it: "The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but
to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise."

## Ships

An Urbit `ship` is a cryptographic title on a `will` signed by private 
key , a human-memorable name, and a packet routing address. Ships are 
classed by the number of bits in their address:

    Size   Name    Parent  Object      Example
    -----  ------  ------  ------      -------
{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.10168195718654434, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0015290519877675841, 'mean_word_length': 2.6260387811634347, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 3, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '4474431', 'n_tokens_mistral': 392, 'n_tokens_neox': 365, 'n_words': 189}