Glossary

The key terms of this site and its city, each explained in a few plain sentences, with a link to the page where it is discussed.

Balance and balance spring

The regulating organ of a mechanical watch: a small wheel that turns back and forth, and a fine spiral spring that gives it its own steady period. Christiaan Huygens developed the assembly around 1675; it plays the role that the pendulum plays in a clock. Read more →

CERN Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire

Europe’s laboratory for particle physics, with two main sites on either side of the Franco-Swiss border next to Geneva. The acronym comes from a provisional council set up in 1952; twelve states signed the CERN Convention in 1953, and the organisation came into being in 1954. The World Wide Web was invented there. Read more →

Chronometer

A high-precision watch whose accuracy has been certified by a neutral official body. In Switzerland that body is COSC, which tests movements according to ISO 3159 for about two weeks, in five positions and at three temperatures; the average daily rate must stay between −4 and +6 seconds. Read more →

Escapement

The part of a mechanical clock or watch that releases the energy of the mainspring in small, regular steps. A toothed escape wheel is held and released by a pallet, so that it advances by one tooth with each swing of the pendulum or balance and gives it a small push to keep it going. Read more →

Exoplanet extrasolar planet

A planet outside the Solar System, orbiting a star other than the Sun. The first were reported in 1992 around the pulsar PSR B1257+12; in 1995 Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva found 51 Pegasi b, the first around a sun-like star, which earned them a share of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. Read more →

Geneva Conventions

Four international treaties of 12 August 1949 that set limits in war. They protect the wounded and sick on land, the wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea, prisoners of war and civilians in the hands of the enemy. Every state in the world is party to them; three Additional Protocols (1977 and 2005) supplement them but are not universally ratified. Read more →

Geneva Observatory

An observatory founded in 1772 by the astronomer Jacques-André Mallet, whose early work was largely chronometry and meteorology. It has worked at Sauverny, north of the city, since 1966 and is today the University of Geneva’s Department of Astronomy; it led the consortium that built the planet-hunting spectrograph HARPS. Read more →

Geneva Seal Poinçon de Genève

A public guarantee of origin and quality for watches, based on a cantonal law of 1886 and today run on behalf of the State of Geneva by the TIMELAB laboratory. A watch must be made and assembled in the canton; the tests include water resistance, power reserve, every function and a seven-day precision test with a deviation of no more than one minute. Read more →

Headquarters agreement

An agreement between an intergovernmental organisation and its host state that sets out the organisation’s privileges and immunities. In Switzerland it is usually concluded with the Federal Council; since 1 January 2008 the general framework has been the Host State Act. Read more →

ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross

A humanitarian organisation founded in Geneva in 1863 and still based there. Its mandate comes from the Geneva Conventions, their Additional Protocols and the Statutes of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement: it works for people affected by armed conflict and other violence and promotes international humanitarian law. Legally it is an association under Swiss law with international legal personality. Read more →

International Geneva

The community of international organisations, permanent missions of states and non-governmental organisations that work in and around Geneva. Bringing them together in one city lets diplomats, international civil servants, scientists and civil society meet quickly to deal with problems no country can solve alone. Read more →

International Health Regulations IHR (2005)

A legally binding instrument adopted by the World Health Assembly on 23 May 2005 and in force since 15 June 2007. It requires states to notify WHO of events that may threaten public health and sets a framework for responding to a public health emergency of international concern. Amendments in force since 19 September 2025 add a higher alert level, the pandemic emergency. Read more →

International humanitarian law IHL, the law of armed conflict

The body of international rules that, during armed conflict, protects people who are not or no longer taking part in the fighting and limits the means and methods of warfare. Its core is the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols. Read more →

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

A body set up in 1988 by WMO and the UN Environment Programme to assess published scientific literature on climate change; it does not carry out its own research. Its secretariat is hosted by WMO in Geneva. The short Summaries for Policymakers of its reports are approved by governments line by line, together with the authors. Read more →

ISO International Organization for Standardization

The organisation whose members, national standards bodies, approve international standards drafted by experts in its technical committees. It began work on 23 February 1947 with its headquarters in Geneva; there is one member per country, and a draft becomes a standard after a vote by the members. Read more →

Jet d’eau

Geneva’s water fountain and symbol, which rises about 140 metres from the harbour. It began in 1886 as an outlet that released excess pressure from the city’s pressurised water network at the Coulouvrenière pumping station; in 1891 the city moved it to the end of the Eaux-Vives jetty. Read more →

Large Hadron Collider LHC

CERN’s largest particle accelerator, first started on 10 September 2008: a 27-kilometre underground ring of superconducting magnets cooled to 1.9 K (about −271 °C). Two beams of particles travel in opposite directions and collide at four points, where the detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb record the results. Read more →

Palais des Nations

The building in Geneva’s Ariana Park that was built for the League of Nations (foundation stone 1929, occupied from 1936) and has housed the United Nations Office at Geneva since the League handed over its properties in 1946. It is the most visible building of International Geneva. Read more →

Permanent mission

A state’s diplomatic representation to the international organisations of which it is a member. Unlike an embassy, which deals with one other state, a permanent mission works in multilateral diplomacy: many states negotiating together. Almost every UN member state keeps one in Geneva. Read more →

Privileges and immunities

Legal protections given to international organisations, missions and their staff so that they can do their official work freely and independently, not for anyone’s personal benefit. They are not a licence to ignore the law: beneficiaries must respect the host state’s laws, and staff with only functional immunity are subject to ordinary law in their private lives. Read more →

Protective emblem red cross, red crescent, red crystal

A sign protected by law that, in armed conflict, marks medical services and certain humanitarian organisations as protected; intentionally attacking people, vehicles or buildings that use it in accordance with international law is a war crime. The red crystal was added in 2005. The same signs also have an indicative use, showing a link with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. Read more →

Pulsar

The small, dense, fast-spinning remnant of a massive star that has exploded, which sweeps a beam of radio waves past the Earth with clock-like regularity. Timing its pulses very precisely revealed the first known planets outside the Solar System, in 1992. Read more →

Radial velocity method Doppler method

A way of finding planets by the small motion they cause in their star: as both orbit a common centre of mass, the star moves towards us and away, and a spectrograph sees its light shift slightly to the blue and to the red. Because it sees only motion along our line of sight, the method gives a planet’s minimum mass. Read more →

Technical standard

A document agreed by consensus that sets out how products, processes or services are made, measured or made to work together, so that they are compatible across borders. International standards are drafted by experts from many countries; three of the organisations that coordinate them, ISO, IEC and ITU, have their headquarters in Geneva. Read more →

Treille chestnut tree marronnier officiel

Geneva’s official chestnut tree on the Treille. Every spring the sautier, a senior official of the canton’s government and parliament, records the day its first leaf unfolds and announces the start of spring; the Grand Council’s series of dates goes back to 1818. Read more →

UTC Coordinated Universal Time

The world’s reference time scale, built on the SI second, which is defined by a fixed frequency of the caesium-133 atom. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres computes it after the fact from some hundreds of atomic clocks; national laboratories keep real-time approximations of it, which reach our phones and radio clocks. Read more →

WHO World Health Organization

The United Nations agency for health, with its headquarters in Geneva. Its Constitution came into force on 7 April 1948, the date now marked as World Health Day. The Constitution lets it adopt conventions, binding regulations and non-binding recommendations. Read more →

WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization

The UN specialised agency for intellectual property, based in Geneva, set up under a convention signed in Stockholm in 1967. It runs the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which lets an inventor file one international application; there is no “world patent”, and patents are still granted by national or regional offices. Read more →

World Health Assembly WHA

WHO’s decision-making body, attended by delegations from all member states. It meets every year in Geneva, sets the organisation’s policies, appoints the Director-General on the nomination of the Executive Board and approves the budget. Read more →

World Wide Web WWW, the web

A system of linked documents accessed over the internet. Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN in March 1989 so that scientists could share information; the first web server and browser ran there by the end of 1990, and on 30 April 1993 CERN released the web software into the public domain. Read more →