Detrital thermochronological age distributions can be visualized either by probability density estimates or by cumulative probability plots. For the latter, two different kinds of cumulative probability diagrams will be discussed. The various acronyms used in the literature are summarized in Table 1. This section is an attempt to shed a little light in this rather confusing myriad of statistical tools. Each of the options will be defined and compared with its alternatives. After this section, only the terms ``observed CAD'' and ``predicted CAD'' will be used. Readers who are just interested in the applications part of this paper can skip to Section 3.