A Guide to Online Gaming – Internet and Gaming Lingo and Jargon

A Guide To Online Gaming

Gaming Lingo

 If you’ve just submerged yourself in the world of online gaming it can seem as though everyone is speaking a whole different language. English is the main language spoken online, however there are hundreds of words that gamers use that will just make no sense what so ever to new comers.
  While gaming, people need to communicate quickly and accurately. This has led to a huge variety of different words that you won’t see or hear anywhere else except online. One of the most common things that you’ll see in communication online is leetspeek. Leetspeak is also often used by internet trolls (someone who makes a nuisance of themselves intentionally to annoy others). Leetspeak is where letters are substituted for numbers and other characters to create something that resembles a word or letter. For example the word “the” could be wrote in leetspeak as, “t|-|3″ where the number “3″ is used to replace the letter “e” and “|-|” is used to replace the letter “h”. This stuff is generally easy to read as it was created with the idea of substituting letters with things that resemble letters. Another typical example of leetspeak is where instead of using letters, letters are spelt out phonetically. For example the common abbreviation of the saying, “Oh my god” online is “omg”. In leetspeak this can be typed as, “Oh Em Gee” where each letter is just spelt out. This is commonly used for emphasis or whilst mocking someone or something.
  Grammar and misspelling are often changed in order to make something into leetspeak. Although not always, this bad grammar and bad spelling can sometimes be used for emphasis, irony or to mock somebody. For example, if in a game somebody was winning because they were cheating, a phrase such as, “Hay guise, dis guy iz so gud,” could be used. This could also be typed completely in uppercase again for emphasis or to purposely annoy somebody. Uppercase is also sometimes used in conjunction with the number 1, this is used to mock someone who acts childish, or in a non-intelligent manner, to imply that they are not able to press the ’shift’ key or turn ‘capslock’ off. An example of this would be, “OMG ROFL J00 GOT OWNED!!!111!!!1.” To further mock someone, these numbers are sometimes even spelt out, again to imply that somebody is not very intelligent. Instead of ending in, “!!!111!!!1″ it could end with, “!!!11!!!!eleven!!one!1″. Another common phrase is, “All your base are belong to us.” This phrase has become hugely popular and even spawned its own techno songs and various mixes after appearing in the game, ‘Zero Wing’ which was badly translated into english. Other common misspellings are ‘teh’ meaning ‘the’ and ‘pwn’ meaning ‘own’.
  Another part of leetspeak is when a suffix, sometimes made up, is added to the end of a word to add emphasis. The most commonly used suffixes are: -xor (-xor can be added to the term ‘hax’ meaning hacks or hacker to make the word, ‘haxxor”) , -ness (-ness can be added to the term ‘lulz’ meaning ‘lol’ or ‘laugh out loud’ creating the word lulzness), -’d or -d(-d’s can be added to the word ‘owned’ meaning to beat someone quite badly or easily to make the word ‘own’d’ or ‘ownd’), -& (-& is used to replace -and, -anned and sometimes -ant. It can be used to shorten the word ‘banned’ into ‘b&’) , -z0r or -zor or -z0rz or -zorz (-z0r can be added to the word ‘pwn’ a commonly used misspelling of ‘own’ to make the word, ‘pwnz0r’ meaning to be the one who is doing the ‘owning’ or ‘pwning’) , -t (-t is used on words that end in -ed, words like ‘pwned’ can be shortened to ‘pwnt’) and -age(-age can be added to words such as ‘pwn’ and ‘own’ to make ‘pwnage’ and ‘ownage’ meaning the act of ‘pwning’ or ‘owning’). These suffixes are added to different verbs and sometimes nouns just to increase emphasis on the word, to change the tense of a word or to change a noun into a verb or a verb into a noun.
  Abbreviations are common place on the internet. Some commonly used abbreviations are, ‘lol’ meaning ‘laugh out loud’, ‘rofl’ meaning ‘rolling on the floor laughing’, ‘lmao’ meaning ‘laughing my ass off’, ‘omg’ meaning ‘oh my god’, ‘wtf’ meaning ‘what the f**k’, ‘gtfo’ meaning ‘get the f**k out’, ‘4col’ meaning ‘for crying out loud’, ‘2g2bt’ meaning ‘too good to be true’, ‘afk’ meaning ‘away from keyboard’, ‘imo’ meaning ‘in my opinion’, ‘afaik’ meaning ‘as far as I know’, ‘brb’ meaning ‘be right back’, ‘cba’ meaning ‘can’t be a**ed’, ‘hs’ meaning ‘headshot’, ‘bs’ meaning ‘bulls**t’ and ‘btw’ meaning ‘by the way’. These abbreviations may not always be instantly apparent but if you’re not sure don’t be afraid to ask.
  Although these are some of the so called rules of leetspeak, there are other words that are used that may not have any rules behind them. ‘Kek’ or ‘keke’ is sometimes used to express laughter. This is widely used by World of Warcraft players as it is orcish for ‘lol’ in game. ‘Noob’ or ‘n00b’ can be used to describe someone who is new or bad at a game. ‘Pr0n’ or ‘pron’ is used instead of saying ‘porn’ or ‘pornography’. ‘J00′ meaning ‘you’. ‘Zerg’ or ‘Rush’ meaning to overwhelm your opponent with speed, numbers or ease. ‘1337′, ‘leet’ or any leetspeak version of this can mean to be greater than the other players or to be part of the elite. ‘Camp’ meaning ‘to hold one position or area’. ‘Spray n pray’ meaning ‘to shoot wildly and constantly without aiming’. ‘Fanboy’ meaning ’someone who is obsessed with, or knows too much about a brand or franchise’.
  These are some, but by no means all, of the weird and wonderful words you might come across in the realm of the internet. The bottom line is that people are creating new words every day so if you do not understand something that somebody has said either take a guess at what you think it means or ask. There will be people out there who will mock you for not understanding what they’re saying, but there are plenty of people out there who will happily fill you in. When you first start out you’ll probably not have much of a clue about what’s going on, but as you become acustomed to it, you will slowly pick up the language of the gamer.