Every ground fault is a kind of short circuit. Not every short circuit is a ground fault — and that one-way relationship is exactly why ground-fault protection exists as its own detection scheme.
On a job site, the two terms get used almost interchangeably — "we had a fault," "the breaker tripped on a short," "there's a ground fault somewhere on that circuit." But they describe different electrical events, with genuinely different current magnitudes and genuinely different protection schemes built to catch them. Collapsing the distinction isn't just sloppy language — it's how a real ground-fault hazard gets dismissed as something a standard breaker would have already caught.