Hey I just wanted to stop in and say thanks for being patient, the whole terminology thing around ideologies is one of the more confusing barriers to entry into leftist thought but you're working thru it like a champ

You've already been linked the Wikipedia definition which is super helpful but I'm gonna paste the first bit again because it's worth reading more times, for fluent lefties as well:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion, constitutional government and privacy rights.

Based on this, all democrats and pretty much all republicans and libertarians are liberals, and that's on purpose. This is what we mean when we throw punches at "libs" - we all believe that some of these qualities are good, but libs believe that all of these things are good - we don't terribly like things like "equality before the law" (it's just as bad for Jeff Bezos to steal a loaf of bread from a supermarket as it is for a houseless person), "freedom of the press/speech" (your freedom of the press is legally endowed on you just as it is to Elon Musk or Rupert Murdoch even though their actual freedom of the press is millions of times what yours is because they own billion dollar news and speech platforms), "right to private property" (you have the right to own dozens of resort properties just like Donald Trump does), etc. Liberalism - democrat, Republican, and libertarian - is built on the idea that everyone can use dollars and power and status to exercise their rights to whatever degree they want to, and one of our biggest reasons for calling them out under their shared umbrella of liberalism is that they all share the same fallacious worldview that allows people with more dollars to have more fundamental enshrined rights, and even though people with very few dollars can't actually exercise any of their fundamental enshrined rights, liberals pretend they have the same rights just because they could exercise them if they had more money.

Not really, terms should be historically constituted and there is a serious amount of self-codification among liberal theorists that makes the term extremely useful

There are only eight subspecies of liberalism that actually matter to real world politics, and they cover everything between anarcho-capitalists to DNC blue no matter who libs

Classical liberalism, utopian liberalism, social liberalism, neoliberalism, ordoliberalism, dirigisme, siege liberalism, and the mutated step-child fascism, these are the actual differentiations among the defenders of capitalism

There is only confusion on this matter because utopian, social and neo liberals successfully appropriated a mountain of socialist and anarchist lingo and incoherently applied it to themselves. I don't blame them, liberalism is deprived of any genuine vision of human progress or solidarity, it wears the liberatory spirit of anti-capitalist ideologies like a carnival mask and as a result millions of potential radicals end up confused as to where they stand in the struggle over capitalism

It's a problem. Libertarians stole "libertarian" for the Anarchists. "Liberal" now means you want to paint a rainbow on the bomb. People think "Conservatism" is a real thing but Nazis aren't. Most people have no idea what Anarchism, Communism, or Socialism actually entail, let alone the enormous breadth of thouaght across the length.