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Every term you nodded along to, explained

The vocabulary of the sport in plain language: positions, submissions, gym culture, gear, and the competition rules people argue about. Search it or browse by category.

49 of 49 terms

OssCulture: All-purpose acknowledgment: greeting, respect, agreement, war cry. Overuse is a white-belt tell; total refusal is a purple-belt tell.
RollCulture: Live sparring. "Want to roll?" is the sport’s handshake.
TapCulture: The surrender signal — physical taps on the opponent or mat, or saying "tap." Sacred in both directions: give it early, honor it instantly.
Flow rollCulture: Light, cooperative sparring at low resistance, exchanging positions without ego. Negotiated with the phrase "flow round?"
Open matCulture: Unstructured mat time: no class, just drilling and rolling with whoever shows up.
SpazzingCulture: Wild, explosive, control-free movement, the signature of strong beginners and the leading cause of accidental elbows.
SandbaggingCulture: Competing below your real skill level, e.g. an experienced grappler lingering at white belt to collect medals. Universally scorned.
Mat ratCulture: Someone who is always at the gym, every class, every open mat. A compliment.
GuardPositions: Fighting from your back or seated with your legs between you and the opponent. The position family that defines BJJ: closed, open, half, and their hundred children.
Closed guardPositions: Legs locked around the opponent’s waist while you are on your back. Home base for beginners and a complete offensive system.
Half guardPositions: You control one of the opponent’s legs between yours. Once a last resort, now an entire style.
Side controlPositions: Chest-on-chest pin past the legs. Heavy, demoralizing, and the first pin beginners learn to escape.
MountPositions: Sitting astride the opponent’s torso. One of the most dominant positions; four points in competition.
Back controlPositions: Chest glued to the opponent’s back with hooks (feet) inside their thighs. The king position: your weapons face their defenses backward.
Knee on bellyPositions: A mobile pin with your knee across their torso. Scores points and extracts sounds.
TurtlePositions: Defensive all-fours shell, hiding the neck and arms. A waystation, not a home.
HooksPositions: Feet placed inside the opponent’s legs for control, especially from the back.
SweepTechniques: Reversing from guard: bottom player becomes top player. Two points in competition.
Guard passTechniques: Getting around the legs from top position into a pin. The other half of the sport’s central battle.
FrameTechniques: Rigid skeletal barriers (forearms, shins) that hold weight off you so you can move. The defensive alphabet.
ShrimpTechniques: The hip-escape movement: on your side, push off your feet to scoot hips away. The single most-drilled movement in the sport.
BridgeTechniques: Explosive hip lift off your back, the engine of mount escapes and pin reversals. Also called upa.
Technical stand-upTechniques: The structurally sound way to stand from the ground while facing an opponent, posting one hand and rising with a base.
UnderhookTechniques: Your arm under theirs, controlling the torso. Currency in half guard, the clinch, and the dogfight.
WhizzerTechniques: The overhook counter to an underhook, from wrestling and everywhere.
BaseTechniques: Structural stability against being swept or thrown. "Good base" is why some people feel bolted to the floor.
PostureTechniques: Spinal alignment that resists being broken down, especially inside closed guard. Rule one of top position.
Grip fightingTechniques: The battle for grips before the battle. In the gi it is chess; in no-gi it is speed chess.
SubmissionSubmissions: A choke or joint lock that forces the tap. The endgame of the art.
ArmbarSubmissions: Hyperextending the elbow using your hips as the fulcrum. The most iconic joint lock in grappling.
Triangle chokeSubmissions: Strangling with your legs in a figure-four around neck and one arm. The reason lanky guard players are feared.
Rear naked chokeSubmissions: The blood choke from back control, arm around the neck. The highest-percentage finish in grappling and MMA.
KimuraSubmissions: Shoulder lock with a figure-four grip, named for the judoka who broke Hélio Gracie’s arm with it in 1951.
AmericanaSubmissions: The kimura’s mirror: shoulder lock with the arm bent upward, usually from side control or mount.
GuillotineSubmissions: Front headlock choke, arm under the neck. The eternal punisher of lazy takedown entries.
OmoplataSubmissions: Shoulder lock applied with your legs from guard. Gateway to an entire attacking system.
Heel hookSubmissions: Rotational leg lock twisting the heel to attack the knee’s ligaments. Devastating, fast, and rule-restricted; treated with ceremony in training.
Blood chokeSubmissions: Strangle that stops carotid blood flow (vs air chokes on the windpipe). Seconds to work, immediately reversible at the tap.
GiGear: The kimono uniform: jacket, pants, belt. Grippable by rule, which defines the entire gi game.
No-giGear: Grappling in rash guard and shorts: no cloth grips, faster pace, bigger leg-lock meta.
Rash guardGear: Fitted athletic shirt worn for no-gi and under gis: friction and hygiene armor.
SpatsGear: Grappling leggings; mat-burn and skin-infection insurance that also holds your knee sleeves up.
Belt (rank)Gear: White, blue, purple, brown, black for adults — the decade-long ladder. See the full belt system guide.
StripesGear: Tape marks on the belt (up to four) marking progress within a rank, at instructor discretion.
IBJJFCompetition: The largest federation: runs the major tournaments and publishes the belt and rule standards most academies reference.
PointsCompetition: Takedown 2, sweep 2, knee-on-belly 2, guard pass 3, mount 4, back control 4 — the IBJJF scoring skeleton.
AdvantageCompetition: A near-score tiebreaker: almost passing, almost sweeping, almost finishing. Deciding matches since forever, annoying purists equally long.
ReapingCompetition: Crossing your leg over the opponent’s knee line from certain leg entanglements: restricted at many belt levels for knee safety, legal in others. Know your division.
DQCompetition: Disqualification, commonly via illegal technique for the division (reaping, heel hooks below the allowed belt, slams).

The ten terms to know before your first class

If you are walking in Tuesday and want to nod along credibly: roll (spar), tap (surrender, instantly honored), guard (fighting off your back, on purpose), mount and side control (the pins), sweep (bottom becomes top), pass (getting around the legs), frame (the forearm barriers keeping weight off you), shrimp (the escape movement you will drill forever), and oss (the all-purpose acknowledgment). That vocabulary covers most of what a coach says to a beginner in week one; the rest of the first-day briefing is in BJJ for beginners.

Why the vocabulary is such a mess

BJJ terminology is a pile-up of four sources: Japanese inherited through judo (kimura, omoplata via Brazil's renaming, gi itself), Portuguese from the art's Brazilian century (the "jiu-jitsu" spelling included), wrestling loanwords that arrived with the crossover era (underhook, whizzer, sprawl), and pure gym slang that stuck (spazzing, mat rat, sandbagging). The same technique often carries two or three names — an americana is a keylock is ude-garami depending on who taught your coach — which is why the search box above matches descriptions, not just names.

Go deeper

Terms are the map; the territory lives in the guides. The ranking vocabulary (belts, stripes, coral) is unpacked in the belt system guide, the gi/no-gi split in its own comparison, competition scoring inside the grappling-arts comparisons, and the injury vocabulary (auricular hematoma, tinea, and friends) across the health guides. Missing a term you have heard on the mats? Tell us, the list grows.

Know exactly where you are on the path.

RollPath is a Jiu Jitsu journal built around the belt system: what to learn at your belt, a log for every roll, and a timeline that shows how far you've come and what's between you and the next promotion. Coming to iOS.

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