char tofrom numerical types being the exception . And also pointer casts Infact numeral casts are the only ones allowed to do type conversion , I think , and in specific ways . i . e . the dreaded implicit integer promotion with casts being sometimes data and sometimes semantic . Think an int cast to a byte it ' s truncated along data terms , rather than saturating the byte to 255 . Anyway , I ' m not sure of the answer here . I don ' t know if computer science has settled on an exact meaning for cast or typecast vs typeconversion yet . Wiki seems to think they ' re the same thing , as it has them both in the bold bit at the top , but notes that some languages , e . g . ALGOLlike languages of which C is influenced , treats them differently . And C is a clusterfuckIn the C family of languages and ALGOL 68 , the word cast typically refers to an explicit type conversion as opposed to an implicit conversion , causing some ambiguity about whether this is a reinterpretation of a bitpattern or a real data representation conversion . More important is the multitude of ways and rules that apply to what data type or class is located by a pointer and how a pointer may be adjusted by the compiler in cases like object class inheritance . i . e . Nobody knows ! But for this specific issue we ' re talking about , I ' ve looking it up in the specstd . orgjtc 1 sc 22 wg 14 wwwdocsn 1124 . pdf 6 . 3 Talks about conversion , and calls cast explicit conversions . It also gives the rules about which specific type conversions are allowed . It splits things into arithmetic types and And 6 . 5 . 4 specifies what a cast is , and talks about it in terms of conversion . and 7 . 20 . 1 labels atoi as an Numeric conversion functions . So according to C a cast is the specific operation involving thesethings , and type conversion is the thing a cast actually does . But a cast isn ' t the only thing that does type conversion , i . e . type conversion happening anytime you breath near an arithmetic type that is smaller than an int or double , for floats . edit In python , the term is actually c a s t c h eckkeywordsyesareadefault ! This nonhelpful referencecast # typing . cast ctypes uses it , as you ' d expectcast # ctypes . cast memoryview uses itcast # memoryview . cast . Which makes sense I guess . Interestingly struct doesn ' t use the termstruct # modulestruct .