Along comes the steel guitar and the terminology gets confused. Early steel guitars were ordinary guitars modified with nut risers, or with new, higher nuts and bridges, but they retained the frets, as do most resonator guitars and Weissenborns today. But modern steel guitars usually have printed position markers, more akin to rulers than fretboards. So they don't have fretboards. More like violins, they have fingerboards.
To add even more to the confusion, some steel guitars are built with frets for appearance sake, although they will never be used.
So what is it, fretboard or fingerboard?
A similar thing happened to the peghead. In days of yore all string instruments used friction pegs, so that end of the instrument was known as the peghead, usually because it was decorated with a head carved into the end. Then someone started putting wire strings on instruments and they wouldn't stay in tune with friction pegs. The first solution, as is found on harps and pianos to this day, is the rest pin. A head holding the pins would then be a pinhead, and indeed this term is still used for abuse. Then came the geared tuners. So that end of the instrument became the machine head. But technically speaking, a Flamenco guitar has a peghead, whilst a steel-strung guitar has a machine head. All steel guitars have machine heads, except that that end of the steel guitar is not a head. I have yet to see a steel guitar with a head carved into the end.
Of course, some early steel guitars put the mechanism at the other end of the instrument, something that often confuses eBay sellers when they take photos. of MultiKords backwards.
...then what about keyless steel guitars?
