Terminology can be tricky. To the best of my knowledge, there is no universally recognized lexicon in the toy collecting industry that all of us have agreed to use. It's an interesting thing to explore and discuss however, and I thought it might be useful to outline at least a few terms that are commonly used here on our website. None of these are set in stone, and are only presented here to help provide a common reference when reviewing items and articles on the Ice Planet. We are constantly working to improve and enhance our website, so if you catch that we're misusing a term somewhere, I'm sure we'll catch it and correct it sometime in the near future!

• Modern: Generally speaking, modern refers to anything released in the year 2000 and after
  
• Vintage: Generally speaking, vintage refers to anything released from 1960 to 2000
• Antique: Generally speaking, antique refers to anything released before 1960
• Retro: A modern item recently released but intentionally made to look vintage or perhaps even antique. In many cases, we try to include the year an item was released to help avoid confusion between retro style items and actual vintage pieces. Hasbro throws this for a bit of a loop in using the word vintage in their Star Wars The Vintage Collection (TVC) toy line. These are really modern figures on vintage "style" cards, but not to be confused with their Retro Series, which is a combination of modern, vintage-style figures on vintage-style cardbacks. And certainly not meant to be confused with actual vintage pieces. (See why terminology can be tricky??) 
• MIB: An acronym that stands for Mint In Box, typically used to indicate that an item is factory sealed and has never been opened. Occasionally the acronym MISB (Mint In Sealed Box) will be used to emphasize the fact that the item has never been opened. Some items, such as Pop! Vinyls for instance, may be MIB but come untaped/unsealed from the factory, so MISB would not be appropriate for those types of item descriptions even though they may never have been opened. Just as a helpful sidenote, items that come in "collector friendly packaging" can potentially be misleading. Items that can be put back into their original boxes or clamshell packaging may appear to be unopened/unused, but in reality they could have been removed, displayed, modified, etc., and put back into their packaging. We make every effort to understand the history of our items to the best of our ability and will clearly indicate, as best we can, if an item appears to have been opened at some point and replaced in its original packaging. This may also affect the pricing used for the piece as well. 
• MOC: An acronym that stands for Mint On Card, indicating that a figure or other item is still sealed on the original cardback that it was originally released on.
• MIP: Similar to the above descriptions, this acronym stands for Mint In Packaging. Occasionally the acronym MIMP will be used to denote Mint In Mint Packaging. The same can be said for MIMB (Mint in Mint Box), MOMC (Mint on Mint Card), etc. 
• Loose: Generally speaking, this means that an item has been opened and is being offered without its original packaging, or with the original packaging included but not still sealed. An item may specifically be loose/complete, loose in mint condition, etc.