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The same object picked up different names in different rooms while this was being designed — five documents, drifting nouns, and two facts that flatly contradicted each other. CONTRACT-SCHEMA v0 settled all of it. Where you meet a losing word somewhere in the product or its source, it means the same thing. It is drift, not a distinction.

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What won, and what lost

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The words that do exact work

To agree to the words of a Version. It is not signing, and the two are never rounded into one state. See Accepting is not signing.
A person putting their name to a wordsHash — the exact words — never to the contract as a moving object.
A sha256 of the contract’s canonical text. It is the identity of the words; a Version is the identity of a moment. The canonicalisation spec behind it, CANON-1, does not exist yet.
A signature that survives an open question, because an open question is a proposal and the words have not moved.
Which hand held the pen when a contract was drafted. It records provenance and never confers authority.
A country holding more than one legal system — the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia. A heading, never a choice: nothing can be governed by one. See Governing law.
A person with no account, acting through the link they were sent. They never make an account and never pay.
The first screen of contracts.io: one field and the controls around it, before anyone is signed in. See The door.
The AI in the product. It writes, and it never sends and never signs. See Lex.

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Words we do not use

Envelope. A borrowed idiom from signature software, where a contract is cargo being routed. Here the contract is the object and there is nothing carrying it. Workflow. Nothing here is a routing order you configure in advance. Sign off. It blurs accepting and signing, which is the one distinction the product exists to keep. CLM. Not a word anyone outside the category says out loud. Section numbers as identity. Block numbers are display-only. Never key on one.