Aging and noise are used to elucidate the types of frozen order formed in the relaxor regime. In PMN, PMN with 10&percent; PT, and PLZT aging deep in the relaxor regime shows several features characteristic of spinglasses, including multiple independent susceptibility ‘holes’ formed at different aging temperatures. This effect requires complex cooperative glassy freezing of many local units. However, the field scale required to disrupt the aging is anomalously high compared to spinglasses, if a nanodomain is the unit corresponding to a spin. Barkhausen noise results imply cooperative moment changes involving several nanodomains near Tg, but much smaller steps below Tg. This result suggests that kinetic barriers increase at Tgwithout increasing coupling among nanodomains. Together, these results suggest that in prototypical relaxors the glassy state is not formed by nanodomains, although it affects their dynamics, but rather by smaller units. We tentatively propose that the canted components of the local polarizations (found in scattering experiments) are analogous to the x‐y spins in a reentrant spinglass. The first tested prediction of this new picture is that spinglass‐like aging effects would be absent in the uniaxial ‘relaxor’ SBN. Such effects do vanish well below Tgin SBN. © 2003 American Institute of Physics