Gail Badner I'm not sure if I get. It seems to be that these are different meanings of 'initialization'.

Hibernate#isPropertyInitialized is about attributes being loaded (it checks the status of a proxy or the interceptor for enhanced entities). In that sense, an extra-lazy collection can be initialized even if it's elements are not yet loaded.

Other way to think about it is to consider that an extra-lazy collection has 3 stages - one where the attribute is not loaded at all, another where the attribute is loaded but the elements are not, and a third where it's fully loaded.

This is my understanding, please comment if you think I'm wrong.