A glossary: what you call it versus what the code calls it

People searching for the rules on a second home rarely use the words the law uses. So we checked: which terms actually appear in the 28 municipal codes in this ledger, and which are purely conversational. The answer is blunter than expected. 'Granny flat' appears nowhere — the word 'granny' does not occur once in any of the 28 codes. Neither does 'mother-in-law', 'in-law', or 'casita', despite casita being the everyday word for a backyard unit across much of Colorado's Front Range. What the codes do use: ADU everywhere, DADU in all sixteen Washington cities but essentially nowhere in Colorado, and a few oddities worth knowing — Colorado Springs sets a separate height standard for garage conversions, Redmond permits tiny homes on wheels as an ADU type while Westminster expressly forbids them, and Denver allows a carriage-lot ADU with no primary house at all. The practical point is that the name changes nothing at the permit counter, which is exactly why the vocabulary is worth writing down. Four new statewide answers cover the same ground.