Three ways to find out what a header on a GiltIQ table means — hover it, turn explain mode on, or open the glossary page — and all three read from the one table of terms.
Every annotated column header on the site names one term, and that term's plain-English sentence is written down in one place. However you ask for the explanation you get the same sentence back: the hover tooltip, explain mode and the glossary page are three doors into one table, not three versions of the answer.
The three routes
Hover a header
A header that carries an explanation is drawn with a dotted underline. Rest a pointer on it and a tooltip prints the sentence; take the pointer away and it goes. It needs no account and no setting, which makes it the route for a reader who is already looking at a figure.
Turn on explain mode
The Explain the figures control in the header turns every one of those tooltips into text on the page: the same sentence appears under each header as a small line, so a whole table's vocabulary can be read in one pass instead of column by column.
Open the glossary
The glossary page prints the entire table — each term, the label the table shows, and its sentence — grouped into gilt vocabulary and the bond ladder's own words, with an A–Z strip to jump by first letter. It is the page to read before a first gilt list, and the page to come back to when a header you have not met turns up.
What the table holds
Thirty-two entries, in the order a reader meets them: twenty-five from the gilt lists, the curves, the post-tax table and the portfolios, then the bond ladder's seven. Each is one sentence — long enough to define the term, short enough to work as a tooltip.
Fifteen of the terms also carry a short video. Where one does, the explanation ends with a see this explained link that opens the clip at the second the term itself is covered, rather than at the clip's opening.
| Group | Entries | Where you meet them |
| Gilt vocabulary | Twenty-five | The gilt lists, each gilt's page, the curves, the post-tax table and the portfolios |
| The bond ladder's vocabulary | Seven | The ladder page |
| With a video | Fifteen | Anywhere the term is annotated |
Why one sentence and not two
The tooltip and the inline explanation are the same text on purpose. Two versions of an explanation drift, and a glossary that has drifted is worse than none: the reader who uses one door would get a different answer from the reader who uses another. One sentence that works both as a tooltip and as a line of prose is the constraint that keeps the copy honest.
It also gives the site a way to check itself. A template header that names a term the glossary does not hold fails the build, and so does a term no header names — so the table can neither grow a dead entry nor lose one that is still in use.
Not everything is annotated
A header with no underline carries no glossary entry. Either the label is plain enough not to need one, or the figure is one the page's own note explains in a paragraph above the table — How to read this list, How to read this curve, How to read these cash flows and their siblings. The note is the place for the method; the glossary is the place for the word.
A term the glossary lacks is missing everywhere, because there is no second source to fall back on. That is a gap worth reporting rather than reading around. The gilt list is the densest place to see the difference: nine annotated headers and five plain ones in a single row.
The terms behind this page are the glossary's clean-price, dirty-price, accrued-interest, index-ratio, gross-yield and net-yield.