Climbing Jargon- What's It All About?
Do you know your crimp from your karabiner?
Climbing, like any sport, is awash with technical terms and highly specific lingo. Unlike other sports though, climbing terms can often be difficult (or impossible) for people new to the sport to work out from context. Have you ever been sandbagged? How’s your redpointing? Here’s our list of the most common terms a new climber should get to grips with in order to hold their own in coversation with even the most rad climber dudes. Send it bro!
Types of climbing
Bouldering: low-height climbing without ropes, usually up to around 4 metres indoors and often much more physical than roped climbing.
Top-roping: climbing whilst kept safe by a rope which is already in-situ at the top of the climb.
Leading/lead climbing: climbing whilst clipping a rope tied to your harness to fixed points as you go. It’s more like climbing outdoors but does bring the potential for larger falls than top-roping.
Seconding: climbing a lead climb your partner has just completed. See how it works? The leader leads and the second goes, well, second.
Sport climbing: leading outdoors on real rock at established crags.
Route: applies to any climb done with ropes, the line of holds you follow to the top.
Bloc/problem: the same as a route but refers to bouldering.
Solo/soloing: Like Alex Honnold in Free Solo, it means climbing a route that any mere mortal would use ropes for with nothing but your climbing shoes and malfunctioning amygdala for protection.
Climbing holds (bonus tip: they’re not called grips)
Jug: does what it says on the tin- a big hold you can get a good grip on line the rim of a jug.
Crimp: any small hold big enough for just your fingertips.
Sloper: a rounded, convex hold that you can only grip with an open hand, usually relying heavily on friction to help you out.
Pinch: hold names are quite literal sometimes so I’ll let you work this one out for yourself.
Jam: there are many types of jam, but they all involve wedging a part of your body into a gap and hoping it sticks.
Undercut: an upside-down hold which can be a jug, crimp or sloper. Often used by opposing the force of your feet.
Equipment
Climbing shoes: can be known as rock shoes, rock boots, stickies. A tight fitting shoe with a sole made of high-friction (sticky) rubber which allow you to precisely apply pressure to climbing holds. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes for different styles of climbing, shapes of foot and deepnesses of wallet but a cheaper shoe that fits you well is always going to perform better than an expensive one that doesn’t.
Harness: a loop of strength-rated nylon around each leg joined to one around your waist by a fourth one called a ‘belay loop’. Harnesses come in different fits and different styles, with varying levels of padding and a host of features. The one thing to remember is that as long as you buy new from a reputable and accountable retailer (ahem) a cheap harness is as safe as an expensive one, so don’t feel that you need to spend the earth when starting out.
Karabiner: the spelling of this is long debated, but this is what I’m going with. It’s a small and (usually) pear shaped metal hoop with a spring-loaded gate on one side, allowing a rope to be threaded through it. Climbing karabiners all meet strict safety standards (so the same advice as above applies) and in normal use you won’t even come close to pushing them to their limit, so trust your gear!
Belay device: they now come in many shapes, sizes and levels of complexity but the purpose is the same as it has ever been: to introduce friction to the climbing rope, allowing the belayer hold the weight of a climber with ease, even with the increased force of a fall.
Chalk: calcium carbonate. The same stuff that teachers write on blackboards with (young people: imagine an interactive whiteboard but not as clever) but in a powdered form to absorb the sweat from your hands and stop them slipping around on climbing holds.
Quickdraw: two karabiners attached to one another by a nylon strap (bonus tip: it’s called a tape, or sometimes a dogbone), used to facilitate lead climbing. Indoors these are already attached to the wall but someone climbing outside would have their own and clip them to the wall as they climb.
Miscellaneous
These are probably the terms that would be most confusing to the uninitiated ear.
Wad: a really strong climber.
Onsight: climbing a route or problem on your first attempt having never seen it (or been given any beta) before.
Flash: as above but you’ve seen it before or watched someone else climb it, so the sequence of moves isn’t a mystery anymore.
Redpoint: climbing a route from the bottom to the top without resting or falling off, having practiced it previously.
Beta: the lowdown on a climb. It could mean anything from advice on a hidden foothold to a full explanation of the sequence of moves, but remember: getting any beta means you can’t claim the onsight!
Sandbag: when someone gives you bad beta and it turns out the route or bloc you’re climbing is much tougher than expected!
Crux: the single most difficult part of a route or problem.
Pump/being pumped: When your forearms stop working and you can’t hold on anymore! If you don’t know what I mean, you’ve never been pumped.
Send: the myth is that this word comes from ‘ascend’. I don’t know if I buy that theory, but to ‘send it’ means to complete a climb. A lesser-used variation is ‘dispatched’, which should only be used with tongue firmly in cheek.
There are so many more I could go into but I think this should give a new climber a good chance of following the conversation in the Boulders cafe, or understanding what’s going on when someone gives them the beta for the crux move on the bloc they’re trying (“if you want to send it next go there’s a hidden crimp which is a bit undercut, make sure you chalk up before you reach it or you might feel like you’ve been sandbagged”).