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Launched the Glossary — 316 vanlife terms in 7 languages
You read a European forum, run into boondocking. You google it — and get either surfing or California slang. We built a Glossary so the same term doesn't have to be decoded from scratch in every language and every country.
In vanlife, terminology arrives all mixed up: American boondocking, German Stellplatz, French aire de service, Spanish área de autocaravanas, Russian "wild camping". Half of them describe the same thing, the other half describe something similar but with a twist. To stop turning this into a quest, we collected everything into one reference.
316 terms in one place, not in ten Google Translate tabs
The Glossary has 316 entries — from vehicle types (campervan, motorhome class A/B/C, fifth-wheel) to everyday details (grey water, dump station, shore power) and legal stuff (carte grise, vignette, ZTL). Each term gets its own page with a definition, regional variants, related concepts, and links to articles on the site where the word appears in context.
Tooltips right inside articles — that's why we started this
The main reason we built the Glossary in the first place: tooltips now work in articles across the site. An unfamiliar term is underlined with a dotted line — hover and a short definition pops up, click and the full Glossary page opens. No need to leave the article, google, come back, and hunt for the paragraph you stopped at. You can see it right inside this post — look at the dotted underline beneath the terms in the paragraph above, hover over any of them.
Boondocking in the US and "wild camping" in Russia — not the same thing
The same English term means different things in Europe and North America, and Russia has its own word for the same phenomenon, adjusted for forestry law. That's why every term carries region tags — US, Canada, Germany and Austria, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Benelux, UK, Russia and CIS, Turkey, Latin America, Brazil, Australia. Open a country — see only what's actually used there.
Twelve categories instead of one long alphabet
At the top of the list — filters by category: vehicle types, layout, electrics, water systems, gas and heating, weight and dimensions, parking and service, towed vehicles, lifestyle, law and registration, apps and websites, our tools. You can go alphabetically through the A–Z bar, or by topic.
How we built it
The OpenVan.camp Editorial team assembled the base list from 200+ forum threads, specialist guides, and conversations with motorhome owners across seven language communities. Every term went through a three-level audit: factual accuracy of the definition, regional anchoring (where it's actually used vs. where it's just a calque), and translation purity — no English leaks into Spanish and Portuguese locales. Prices and tariffs are deliberately left out of definitions: pricing data lives separately in the fuel prices and basket comparison sections, so the Glossary doesn't go stale every six months.
And since the Glossary was up — we launched Quizzes
As a side experiment: since the database now holds 316 terms with definitions and links, it would have been a sin not to turn them into quizzes. The Quizzes section is in test mode for now — a handful of sets to see whether it lands. If it does — we'll polish it, add levels and topics. If not — we'll quietly archive it, no one gets hurt.
What not to expect
The Glossary is a terminology reference, not legal advice. "Carte grise" is explained there as a document, not as a manual for "what to submit to the Lyon prefecture in 2026". For current rules and fees — go to the official country sites. And this doesn't make the terms any simpler. It just means that when an unfamiliar word pops up in an article, you no longer need to open four tabs and cross-check between them.