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Chart Analysis Glossary: 30 Terms in One Line Each

By The ChartSage Team · October 15, 2026

Most trading glossaries define one piece of jargon using three others. This one does not.

Every term below is defined in a single line, in plain English, describing what the thing looks like on a chart rather than what anyone should do about it. Alphabetical, so you can scan.

The glossary

Term	Definition
ATR (Average True Range)	A measure of how large recent candles have been on average, used as a read on current volatility.
Bearish	A description of structure where price has been making lower highs and lower lows.
Body	The thick part of a candlestick, spanning the open and close prices for that period.
Breakout	Price closing outside a range or level that had previously contained it.
Bullish	A description of structure where price has been making higher highs and higher lows.
Candlestick	A single bar showing the open, high, low, and close for one period of time.
Confidence score	A statement of how clearly a chart’s structure is defined, not a probability of any outcome.
Consolidation	A stretch where candles are small and overlapping, with price moving sideways in a tight area.
Divergence	When price makes a new extreme but an indicator derived from price does not follow it.
Doji	A candle whose open and close are nearly equal, leaving almost no body.
Drawdown	The distance from a peak down to a subsequent low, measured on a chart or an equity curve.
Engulfing candle	A candle whose body completely covers the body of the candle before it.
Fibonacci retracement	A set of horizontal levels drawn between a swing high and swing low at fixed proportions.
Gap	A vertical space on the chart where one period opened away from the previous period’s close.
Higher low	A swing low that sits above the previous swing low, the building block of a rising structure.
Liquidity	How much size can trade without moving price much, visible as smoother candles and tighter spreads.
Lower high	A swing high that sits below the previous swing high, the building block of a falling structure.
Moving average	A line plotting the average closing price over a set number of recent periods.
Pullback	A move against the prevailing direction that does not break the structure that defines it.
Range	A region bounded above and below by levels that price has repeatedly failed to close beyond.
Resistance	A zone above current price where selling has previously overcome buying.
Retest	Price returning to a level it recently broke through, to see how it behaves there now.
Reversal	A change in structure where the sequence of highs and lows switches direction.
RSI (Relative Strength Index)	An oscillator scaled 0–100 comparing the size of recent gains to recent losses.
Session	The trading hours of a particular market, such as the London or New York session.
Support	A zone below current price where buying has previously overcome selling.
Swing high	A candle high with lower highs on both sides of it.
Swing low	A candle low with higher lows on both sides of it.
Timeframe	The amount of time each candle represents, such as 5 minutes, 4 hours, or one day.
Trendline	A straight line drawn along a series of swing highs or swing lows to describe a slope.
Volatility	How large price moves have been recently, seen as tall candles and wide ranges.
Volume	How much traded during a period, shown as bars under the chart.
Wick	The thin line above or below a candle body, marking the extreme reached during that period.

How to use a glossary like this

Definitions are a starting point, not the thing itself. A term becomes useful once you can point at it on a chart you did not annotate in advance.

Two habits make that transition faster.

Read the term on a live chart, not in the list. Open any instrument, pick three terms from the table, and find each one on screen. If you cannot find a doji in five minutes on a 5-minute chart, you are looking for the wrong shape.

Notice which terms are descriptions and which are tools. Support, resistance, higher low, and swing high describe things the price did on its own. Moving averages, RSI, and Fibonacci levels are things you add on top. Beginners often mix these up and end up trusting a drawn line more than the candles that produced it — one of the common beginner chart mistakes worth avoiding early.

Where to go next

If several of these terms were new, the honest starting point is a small number of them used well.

• Technical analysis for beginners covers the three that matter first: price, level, and trend.
• Support and resistance explained goes deeper on how zones form, why they hold, and what a break actually looks like.
• How to read a candlestick chart unpacks the body, the wick, and what a single candle does and does not tell you.
• Choosing a chart timeframe explains why the same instrument reads differently at 5 minutes and 4 hours.

A note on the terms we left out

There are hundreds more. Elliott waves, Ichimoku clouds, harmonic patterns, order blocks, market profile — each has a following and a vocabulary of its own.

They are missing here deliberately. A vocabulary is only useful when you can apply every word in it, and thirty terms you can point to on a chart will take you considerably further than three hundred you can only recite.

ChartSage uses this same plain vocabulary when it describes a chart, so the words in its reads are the words in this table.

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Educational technical-analysis tool. Not financial advice. Does not guarantee any outcome or profit.