In my opinion you are actually reading this the wrong way. When I explain concepts such as boxing to people I will refer to type tags. But in that context I use

In my opinion you are actually reading this the wrong way. When I explain concepts such as boxing to people I will refer to type tags. But in that context I use the phrase to refer to how something is implemented. How a type system is implemented is different from how it conceptually / semantically. For instance in Julia types are conceptually objects you can pass around. However they will not always correspond to a type tag. Conceptually all objects in Julia have a type. However at runtime they may not. The JIT compiler could have gotten entirely rid of them. When values are placed in a Julia array, individual elements will typically not have any type tags. However conceptually they still have a type. To me type tags are just an implementation detail which both dynamic and static languages may use. However when you speak at a conceptual level you don't use that word. You don't say, "lets put this type tag into that object," you say "lets put that type into that object, bind to that variable or whatever." The way I like to talk about static and dynamic languages is to say: In dynamic languages values have types, but not expressions / variables. In static languages expressions have types, not values. That is of course a simplification, but IMHO simple and sensible way of making the distinction.