Population

health has become an impor-tant direction for social and health policy in Canada, yet there remains considerable confusion about what ‘population health’ is. The background paper for the confer-ence from which this special issue has emerged identifies at least four different ‘population health frameworks ’ in its appendices.1 We propose a lexicon for pop-ulation health in the hope of clarifying issues to advance this important agenda. It distinguishes population health in its literal meaning from a population health perspec-tive, population health research, a popula-tion health framework, and a populatio