There are actually three approaches to life insurance; (1) Term Insurance (2) Whole Life Insurance, and (3) Endowments.
Further more, there are two types of Whole Life Insurance (1) Ordinary Life Insurance (2) Limited Payment Life Insurance
Besides the ones mentioned above, other types of policies that you hear about are all variations of traditional life insurance:
__ Current Assumption Whole Life Insurance
__ Universal Life Insurance
__ Indexed Universal Life Insurance
__ Variable Universal Life Insurance
__ Variable Life Insurance
__ Joint-Life Insurance
It should be brought to your attention that you should really understand the internal structure of these variations of traditional life policies as to how they generate cash value before you purchase them.