Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-7503158-20141008100320/@comment-241978-20141009192337

The terms are often thrown around in popular culture without regard for their actual meanings.

The concept of a timeline is simple: it's the world you live in where cause and effect are linear. When you're given a choice between A and B, then your timeline splits into two timelines: one where you made choice A and one where you made choice B. And so on and so forth. The branching of these timelines is where the analogy to a tree comes from.

The word universe originally meant the entirety of existence, including alternate timelines. In popular culture it is used as a synonym for timeline, and the word multiverse refers to the collection of all timelines.

The word dimension actually means an axis of a coordinate system (for example: length, width, and height are the axes of 3-dimensional space). In popular culture it's wrongly used as a synonym for universe and timeline.