It's definitely a confusion. The point seems to come up on HN from time to time... I don't care very much about the distinctions but it's still fun to spell out

It's definitely a confusion. The point seems to come up on HN from time to time... I don't care very much about the distinctions but it's still fun to spell out my case for why maybe one should care. "Lisp" has these nice connotations as old-but-gold going back to 1960 and many success stories in real world applications. Common Lisp has a direct lineage to that Lisp, but even ignoring that there's a syntactical lineage too. e.g. You can take stuff from the Lisp 1.5 manual and with very small rewrites have it run on a modern Common Lisp implementation. DEFINE (( (LENGTH (LAMBDA (L) (PROG (U V) (SETQ V 0) (SETQ U L) A (COND ((NULL U) (RETURN V))) (SETQ U (CDR U)) (SETQ V (ADD1 V)) (GO A) ))) )) LENGTH (((X . Y) A CAR (N B) (X Y Z))) ; ---> 5 could be rewritten (even if not idiomatic) to (defparameter length-cl (lambda (l) (prog (u v) (setq v 0) (setq u l) A (cond ((null u) (return v))) (setq u (cdr u)) (setq v (1+ v)) (go a)))) (length-cl '((x . y) a car (n b) (x y z))) ; ---> 5 Differences: CL doesn't have a special top-level that doesn't need parens. CL doesn't use 'define' (though Scheme does), you'd usually use defun for a function and not use lambda either. CL uses '1+' instead of 'add1'. CL needs a quote (or something else) before the argument to the function to avoid trying to evaluate it. But that's basically it. You can do this for other examples in that manual too, including more complex ones. To me, a "dialect" implies that you're in the same language but some users of that language just say things a bit differently to each other. "Howdy" vs "Yo". So "add1" and "1+" might be an instance of a dialect change from 1960. For Common Lisp, "sb-ext:run-program" would be the SBCL "dialect" / implementation's way of running an external program while "run-shell-command" might be Allegro CL's. Is Scheme's call/cc a dialect of Lisp60's prog and go? Clojure doesn't have goto at all.. Racket is much cooler than standard Scheme and has nice packages like https://docs.racket-lang.org/control-manual/index.html https://docs.racket-lang.org/control-manual/index.html but is that a dialect equivalent? At what point does the C equivalent of all the above just become another dialect on the way Lisp says it? (And if you're using Common Lisp as the basis Lisp... do Clojure and Scheme have regional dialects that let them say what CLOS says, or what the condition system says, with minor changes?) As I said at the top I don't think it matters that much, when people talk about "a Lisp" I just assume they mean something with an s-exp syntax and macros, when people talk about "implementing Lisp" I assume they mean "implementing [a] Lisp" but I kinda wish they meant Common Lisp. Such a loose definition raises the question why other langs are described as Algol-like or C-like and never "an Algol" or "a C", or a dialect of either, but whatever.