The vocabulary of charts is smaller than it looks. These are the terms that actually come up, grouped by what they describe.
The chart itself
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Candle | One period on the chart, showing open, close, high and low. See how to read candlestick charts. |
| Body | The part of a candle between the open and close. |
| Wick | The thin line reaching to the high or low of the period. |
| Timeframe | The period each candle represents — one minute, one hour, and so on. |
Structure
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Support | A price area where falls have repeatedly stalled. |
| Resistance | A price area where rises have repeatedly stalled. |
| Range | A market moving sideways between a floor and a ceiling. |
| Trend | The general direction of price over a period. |
| Breakout | Price moving beyond a recognised level. |
| Retest | Price returning to a level it recently broke. |
Movement
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Volatility | How much and how quickly price moves. See what is market volatility. |
| Momentum | The strength and persistence of a move. |
| Pullback | A temporary move against the prevailing direction. |
| Reversal | A change in the prevailing direction. |
| Consolidation | A quiet period after a move, often before the next one. |
Indicators
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Moving average | The average price over a set number of recent periods. See moving averages explained. |
| RSI | A momentum measure on a 0–100 scale. See RSI indicator explained. |
| Divergence | When price and an indicator disagree about direction. |
None of these terms are predictions. They are ways of describing what a chart is doing, which is the point of learning them — clearer description leads to clearer thinking.
Seeing them in practice
Open a demo account and find each of these on a live chart. Ten minutes of that beats an hour of reading definitions.