Difference between grants and awards The tag grants currently has the description "Academic grants are non-repayable funds disbursed by government, trust, foundation or a society."  The tag awards currently has no description.

I am currently in the process of formally naming the forms of monetary support that my university's research council is providing to its employees.  My question is:


  Is there any formal document that describes the difference between a grant and an award?


I'm also interested in how the terms grant and award differ from other terms such as incentive, fellowship, scholarship, professorial chair, and so on.

For example, I know that one who is applying for a grant submits a proposal to be able to get funding for an activity that has not yet been done.  I also know that some awards require nominations (and some disallow self-nomination) and are given for work that has already been done.  I know that grants usually require liquidation of the monetary support given; I am not sure if the same is true for awards.  Grants sometimes have clauses where the recipient is to return the monetary support if he or she fails to submit the expected outputs; I am not sure if the same is true for awards.
I think you basically answered your own question: grants are something where you apply and get money based on what you say you will do. Awards are something you get for work you already did. Some awards do not include any money. I doubt you'll find an authoritative document, because there's no organization that sets rules for the entire academic community. I could image a certain amount of overlap/fuzz, so there could be things that one school/organization calls a grant that somewhere else might call an award.

A confusing additional fact is that the term "award" is also often used as a verb applied to the noun "grant", as in "Professor X was awarded a grant for . . .".  I would not call this "an award" in the noun sense; it is a grant, and "awarding a grant" means "giving a grant" or "deciding who gets a grant".  To me "an award" is the sort of thing described with "Professor X won the ABC Award for . . ."

Here is a page talking about grants vs. "gifts" that restates some of the distinctions you already mentioned, but this is just one accounting context at one university.