Metropolitan Museum glossary: New York museum terms explained

This glossary explains 68 words and names you will meet on tickets, signs, maps and the museum's website when you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, such as "accession number", "lecture badge" and a few names that no longer exist. Each definition is ours, written for a visitor, and says where the term turns up. Where we have a page that goes deeper, the link is in the note under each table.

Why does one museum need a glossary? Partly because the Met describes itself in several overlapping ways, and the numbers disagree. It says its collection holds 1.5 million objects (press release, February 26, 2026), while on September 29, 2026 its free collection API listed 502,881 object records (objects endpoint). Neither figure is wrong. The first is the collection; the second is the part catalogued online so far. Museum texts speak of seventeen curatorial departments, yet the API list has 19 department entries, because it adds The Libraries and The Cloisters and still uses the old name "Modern Art".

Then there are three ways of saying where something is. A wing is a part of the building, usually named for a donor (the Robert Lehman Wing). A department is the curatorial team that looks after a collection (Egyptian Art). A gallery number is the room. They overlap without lining up: The American Wing is both a wing and a department, the John Pierpont Morgan Wing holds two departments, and the museum's own map data uses "wing" for 24 areas that include Photographs and Drawings & Prints, which are collections rather than bricks.

Rule of thumb for finding anything: the wing tells you roughly where you are, the department tells you who is in charge of the object, and only the gallery number gets you to the door.

The museum's content management data listed 466 numbered galleries in September 2026, 448 at Fifth Avenue and 18 at the Cloisters, and a changing share of them is closed at any moment (the museum's gallery closures page has the current list). Numbers, prices and closures in the tables are dated; the rest is stable.

How to reach both buildings is on our getting there page; step-free entrances and wheelchair loans on the accessibility page; the Cloisters, its cloisters and its hours on our Cloisters guide; and which galleries are worth your first two hours on the what to see page. Guided visits of the Egyptian galleries are grouped in our Temple of Dendur tours.

Who qualifies for each price is explained on our admission page; bags, water, strollers and photography on the rules page; why no city pass gets you in on the passes page; and what the lecture badge means when you buy a tour on how to choose a tour. The museum's own wording is in its Plan Your Visit page, admission policy, Visitor Guidelines and Group Guidelines.

For the seventeen departments and where each one sits, see our departments page; Open Access, CC0 and the API are explained step by step on our Open Access page; and William, the copyists and the Gala turn up again among our myths and curiosities. Museum sources: History of The Met, collecting practices policy, Image and Data Resources, API documentation, The Copyist’s Copy, William release and Met Gala history.

Guidebooks, films and taxi drivers keep using names for years after the museum drops them. Below are the ones that confuse visitors most, each with the date it changed. If an old name points you to a place that is gone, the second column says what to ask for.

Then there is the Met itself. Used alone, the name is ambiguous: it can also mean the Metropolitan Opera, the London Underground's Metropolitan line, a stadium and a museum in Manila. When you search, add "New York" or "museum". The dates in this table come from the museum's releases and history page; the full story, from the 1870 founding to the 2030 openings, is on our history page. The Neue Galerie plan is described in the museum's release of May 14, 2026.