Good question

As you noticed, at startup Instant Text loads a bunch of glossaries:

• It loads all the glossaries of the Glossary List
• It loads all the glossaries that you have open in the Glossary Viewer.
• Plus it loads all the other glossaries of the Instant Text glossary ecosystem

The Instant Text glossary ecosystem has several types of glossaries, active in parallel, while you type:

• The Current Glossary, always an Expansion Glossary, is used to expand abbreviations.
• The Shield Glossary helps you avoid unwanted expansions when you use Expander Keys.
• The Hotkey Glossary is used to expand hotkeys.
• The Typo Glossary is used to correct your typos.

The Pick, Snippet and Variable glossaries are repositories for pick lists, snippets and variables that can be referenced inside expansions.

At an abstract level, a glossary can be seen as a set of glossary entries which establish a link between a key and an expansion, and the semantic of the key depends on the glossary type: