The digitalization of payments has accelerated in recent decades with internet banking and ever faster and cheaper computing. Many believe decentralized finance now offers fundamentally new possibilities for trading, payments and settlement. Moreover, for a few years, central banks have been launching work on what have been called retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies. The rise of innovative technologies has seen the advent of new terminology, which is widely used but often seems to be biased, confusing or used inconsistently. By providing an etymology of the key concepts and reviewing the terminology and definitions, this paper provides a new approach to clarifying the core concepts of new payments technologies in order to facilitate ongoing discussions about their eventual merits and use cases.