The communication of accounting information requires a special vocabulary (i.e., terminology), and in specialized languages, standardization is considered key to effective and unambiguous communication. To study the determinants and the dynamics of accounting terminology standardization, we examine a global sample of more than 330,000 annual reports from 1995 to 2019. Three main takeaways emerge from our analyses. First, cognitive (e.g., accounting systems) and dialectal (e.g., geographic origin) causes are the most important drivers of terminology standardization. Second, we study two initiatives that could affect firms’ use of standardized accounting terminology – the adoption of IFRS worldwide and the introduction of XBRL in the United States – and find that a new reference set of accounting terms or tags increases standardization. Third, standardization is negatively associated with both the incompleteness within and differences across accounting databases, consistent with the idea of standardized language being instrumental for users in extracting accounting information.