The complement of initialization is finalization, which is primarily used for objects, but not variables.
Setting a memory location to hexadecimal zeroes is also sometimes known as "clearing" and is often performed by an exclusive or instruction (both operands specifying the same variable), at machine code level, since it requires no additional memory access.
A declaration which creates a data object, instead of merely describing its existence, is commonly called a definition.
It is important to note that when you use an initialization list, the values are not assigned to the variable.
C++11 provides for a more powerful concept of initializer lists, by means of a template, called std::initializer_list.