The SafarCheck Baggage Dictionary

Checked: July 2026 against every airline we track · Definitions use verified numbers, and your ticket is always final

Why baggage vocabulary trips people up

Book a flight from Delhi to Dubai and then one from Delhi to New York, and the two tickets will describe your suitcases in different languages. One says 30 kg, the other says 2PC. One measures your cabin bag in centimetres, the other in linear inches. One calls the small bag under your seat a personal item, the next calls it a handbag, and a third says you get no second bag at all. The bag on your shoulder has not changed. Only the words have.

Three separate forces pull the vocabulary in different directions. The first is region. British sites say hand luggage, American sites say carry-on, and airlines across India and the Gulf say cabin baggage, all for the identical bag you keep with you in the cabin. The second is the counting system. Some routes count your checked baggage by the kilogram and some count it by the piece, and the switch between them decides whether 2PC on your ticket is generous or tight. The third is the unit. A checked-bag size limit shows up as 158 cm on a Gulf carrier and as 62 linear inches on a North American one, even though both describe the same box.

None of this is meant to confuse you, but it does. A traveller who reads 1PC as one kilogram, or assumes 62 inches means one side of the bag, packs the wrong suitcase and pays for it at the counter. The fix is not to memorise every airline. It is to learn the handful of words underneath them all, because once the vocabulary is clear, every ticket reads the same way.

The words change, the bag does not

This dictionary sorts the confusion into eight terms, grouped by the job each one does. Two of them, the piece concept and the 1PC or 2PC shorthand, are about how airlines count your checked bags. Three, linear inches, 158 cm and the personal item, are about size and what fits where. The last three, cabin versus checked versus carry-on, baggage allowance and excess baggage, are the frame that holds the rest together: the names of the bags, the free limit and the charge for going over it.

You do not need all eight to read your ticket. If your flight stays inside India, the Gulf or most of Asia, your bags are counted by total weight, so the allowance and excess entries matter most and the piece entries can wait. If you are flying to or from the United States, Canada, South America or out of Africa, the piece concept is the first thing to understand, because your whole allowance is written in pieces rather than kilograms. The size entries matter to everyone, because a bag that is the right weight can still be turned away for being the wrong shape.

How this dictionary is built

Every number in these pages comes from the SafarCheck data file that our airline guides and tools already read from, checked against official airline sources in July 2026. When an airline publishes a figure plainly, we quote it. When two of an airline's own pages disagree, or when a rule is contested, we say so rather than inventing a clean answer. Where a value depends on your exact fare, route or travel class, the entry points you to your ticket, because the allowance printed there overrides every table on the internet, including ours. Numbers we cannot verify are left out. That restraint is the point: these definitions are meant to be quoted, so they only state what we can stand behind.

Pick a term below to read its full entry. Each one ends with links to two related terms and to the bag size checker, so you can move from the definition straight to testing your own bag against all 14 airlines we track.

The eight terms

Keep reading

Definitions compiled by SafarCheck and checked July 2026 against each airline's published information. Baggage rules change without notice, and the allowance printed on your ticket is final. SafarCheck is not affiliated with any airline.