[lobster_johnson]

Ironically, the "query language" part also misses the mark, and I think that part confuses people more (as in that RethinkDB discussion).

GraphQL is closer to what we call a protocol; it has minimal syntax, a kind of data model, and it can only be used for declaring requests. You can't implement anything in GraphQL: absolutely all of its expressions are implementation-provided — contrast with, say, SQL, which, being an actual query language, defines operators, arithmetic expressions, mutations, etc. A defining quality of a protocol is that it's a medium through which clients can talk to multiple black-box implementations, which is exactly what GraphQL is.

I like GraphQL, but I wish you'd thought through the name before you started to publish about it. If you'd called it something like Extensible API Protocol, nobody would have batted an eyelid.