Glossary
What the numbers actually mean
Every term this app measures, explained in full — and the WhatsApp and texting mechanics behind it.
Volume
- WhatsApp chat exportThe .txt (or .zip with media) file WhatsApp generates from a chat, and the only input any chat-analysis tool needs.
- Message countEvery text, photo, voice note, or sticker with a timestamp and a sender — the base unit every other statistic is built from.
- Word count (chat)Whitespace-separated tokens across every text message — a rougher measure than message count, and a fairer one for comparing two people.
- Messages per active dayTotal messages divided by the days that had at least one — a better read on intensity than dividing by every day in the window.
- "WhatsApp Wrapped" (the format)A year-in-review recap for a chat, in the style Spotify made famous for listening habits — built from an export, not from anything WhatsApp itself provides.
Timing
- Wrapped time windowThe span of dates a recap actually covers — a calendar year by default, but not the only honest way to slice a chat.
- Night owl (texting)The share of someone’s messages sent between midnight and 5am — a simple, honest proxy for who’s awake when they probably shouldn’t be.
- Reply wait timeHow long an opening message sits before anyone answers it — the number most people actually mean by "how fast do you reply".
- Burst reply timeThe typing-speed number — how fast someone answers while a back-and-forth is already happening, usually measured in seconds.
- Conversation (session boundary)A run of messages with less than 30 minutes between any two of them — the boundary that separates "a reply" from "starting something new".
- Overnight replyA reply that came more than six hours later, crossing the small hours — tracked apart from ordinary reply times because it’s a different thing entirely.
Relationship
- Texting streakConsecutive calendar days with at least one message from either person — one text is enough to keep it alive.
- Chat silenceThe longest run of days with nothing from either side, and who broke it — the mirror image of a streak.
- Double-textingSending two or more messages in a row with no reply in between — a single run, however long, counts once.
- Who starts the conversationWhich person sends the first message of the day, tallied across every active day — one of the plainer signals of who’s reaching out.
- Texting asymmetry scoreFour measures combined into one score from −1 to +1 describing which side is putting in more of the texting effort — with a wide "dead even" band on purpose.
- GhostingEnding contact abruptly, with no explanation, rather than saying the conversation — or the relationship — is over.
- SituationshipA romantic or semi-romantic connection that’s never been given a defined label — more than casual, less than official, and often texted about constantly.
- Digital body languageThe tone carried by how a text is sent — reply speed, message length, punctuation, capitalization — separate from what it literally says.
Media & mechanics
- "Media omitted" (WhatsApp)The placeholder text WhatsApp writes into an export in place of a photo, video, or voice note when the chat is exported "without media".
- Media vault (attachment breakdown)A count of every attachment in a chat, broken down by kind — photo, video, voice note, sticker, GIF, contact card, location pin.
- Deleted messages (WhatsApp)A message removed after sending, which WhatsApp leaves a placeholder for in the export — the text itself is gone for everyone, permanently.
- System message (WhatsApp)A line WhatsApp writes into the chat itself — someone joined, a call happened, the encryption notice — with no sender and no place in a message count.
- Read receipts ("blue ticks")The check marks next to a sent message: one for sent, two grey for delivered, two blue for read — and what an export can and can’t say about them.
Language
- Emoji counting (grapheme-aware)Counting emoji correctly means counting whole, rendered symbols — not the raw characters a multi-part emoji is secretly built from.
- Top expressions (chat n-grams)The one-, two-, and three-word phrases someone actually uses most — filtered so the answer isn’t just "the" and "a" in every chat.
- Signature wordThe single word where the gap between two people’s usage is widest — measured as a rate, not a raw count, so whoever writes more doesn’t win by default.
- Laugh inflationWhether "haha" grows into "hahahahaha" over the life of a relationship — comparing laugh length early on against laugh length later.
- Quoted replies and @mentionsReplying directly to an earlier message, or tagging someone by name in a group — both leave a distinct mark in the export, separate from the message’s own text.