In summary, it is reasonable to hypothesize that this semantic shortcoming in NMR terminology is a major impediment to the understanding, utility, and further development of the technique. For example, unravelling the full information potential of the simple HNMR spectrum will be hampered until practitioners distinguish clearly between patterns, peaks, and the underlying lines and transitions, and map them more transparently to existing conventions for first-order multiplicity assignments. Another implication of this hypothesis is that machine-readable and, therefore, more automated forms of spectroscopic data analysis require acknowledgement of the fact that visual vs. computational interpretation have distinct requirements that are both closely tied to specific terminology. It should be kept in mind that alternative processing approaches such as CRAFT also necessitate a more specific terminology, such as presented here.