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League of Legends Dictionary: 20 terms you should know
The terms, acronyms, phrases and slang words that are a must-know for any League of Legends player.
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It is no secret that League of Legends is a massively popular online game. Drawing in approximately 115 million monthly players across the globe, a large increase from last year’s average of 75 million monthly players, its cultural impact continues to expand. For those who are just getting into League, a game of this size and popularity will have a lot of nuances that can’t possibly be explained in-game through a chat function, requiring more than just loading screen tips to understand.
The game needs a resource to help list and explain key terms, phrases, and slang important to know as you tackle the Summoner's Rift. Something to help new and old players alike. Something that can explain both standard and niche terms in the game. The game needs an official glossary of some sort, maybe.
Unfortunately, there is no such resource for League’s key terms and phrases, something arguably needed for an online gaming community this large. So here are 20 terms, phrases, and words that all LoL players should know, some of which are general gaming terms and the rest particular to League of Legends:
Did lag ruin your game
Lag is a noticeable delay between an input (pressing a button, clicking on something, etc.) and your champion’s action. It can make your champion feel like they’re moving slower than the competition like you’re always a step or two behind everyone else. Lag can ruin games from a consumer’s point-of-view, where a game slowing down to a halt drains the fun out of the moment entirely – usually owed to dodgy internet connections, which is why big tournaments are played locally with PCs networked together.
Guaranteed no lag
© Colin Young-Wolff / Riot Games
ADC
An ADC (or Attack Damage Carry) is usually in reference to the marksman class, a long-ranged carry who goes into the bottom lane with a support and plays in the back during fights. Some marksmen fall into this term even though they do the same, or sometimes more, magic damage as they do physical (think Kaisa, Kogmaw, on-hit Varus, etc.). The term is often used interchangeably with bottom laner, which can sometimes be mage classes that get flex-picked into an off-role. In these cases, people often refer to the bottom laner as an APC (Ability Power Carry), which means a magic damage-dealing carry.
Jungler never ganks
A term used when you haven’t seen your team’s jungle in a little while while the enemy laner and jungler are pressuring to tower dive you. A term is also used when the jungler camps bot side all game and ignores top lane entirely. While it isn’t uncommon for this to happen, this is a term you’ll often only hear from salty players (usually top laners) when they lose lane 1v1 or 2v2 on their own.
Tower dives
A tower dive is when multiple players go after an enemy player while under their tower’s protection, ignoring the damage it deals, while trying to juggle the turret’s aggro and kill the opponent all at once. This is something that shouldn’t be attempted unless the enemy is very low on HP, you and your team are well coordinated, or you’re just so strong that you can ignore the turret’s damage anyway.
Twitch chat knows best
Twitch chat can be very polarizing, with some liking it and others disliking it enough to turn it off every stream. Streamers, in particular, can view Twitch chat differently depending on their community or the game’s community. This term is in reference to how easy it is to be Captain Hindsight when you are a viewer and not the person playing, criticizing them for their choices or mistakes.
Backseat gaming
This term means to tell someone how to play a game and where to go while not actually being the one in charge. The person backseat gaming often wants to be the one playing instead of the person in control. While backseat gaming doesn’t affect everybody who plays video games, as an audience is needed, it affects a majority of streamers and content creators.
Lane freeze
This is when a laner slows down a minion wave’s push by influencing which minions attack which minions. This requires strategically last-hitting minions (only attacking them at the last second for the gold) so that you can keep the enemy laner stuck in one position. This is to both place the enemy laner in position for a potential allied gank or to keep them out of range for XP and gold from killion minions.
Area of Effect (AoE)
A term used for the area in which an attack or ability reaches and covers. An AoE ability can hit multiple targets and is often considered a very powerful and even game-changing ability, where chaining them together perfects creates the fabled wombo combo.
ARAM
All Random, All Mid (or ARAM) is a game mode where there is only one lane, champions gain gold faster, level up faster, and everyone starts at level three, so fighting can begin immediately. It’s a more chill game mode where both teams take turns losing fights and taking towers until one team wins a big fight and pushes for victory shortly after. The games are much shorter than the ones in Summoner’s Rift and don’t require nearly as much focus, as minions kills and cross-map players are unimportant. Sometimes, one team is just blessed with better champions and stomps the enemy team within 15 minutes.
Blind pick
This means choosing a champion before your enemy laner does. This can be very bad if the enemy picks a counter to your champion, so blind picking is often something considered risky unless the champion you choose is insanely OP. Blind picking can also be useful when choosing a strong flex pick, forcing the enemy into picking a counter that may or may not be useful or letting a powerful blind pick go unpunished.
Trash talking in all-chat
All-chat is the function you use to speak to all players, enemies and allies alike. It’s not uncommon to see people trash-talking or flaming in all-chat when things don’t go their way, they get disrespected by their opposing laner, or someone on their team feeds a lot of kills and tower gold away. Riot Games regularly dishes out chat bans to trash talkers and flamers who use this feature liberally.
Flash on D
This is in reference to the debate of whether or not to play your summoner ability ‘Flash’ on the D or F keys. While this has mostly devolved into a meme, some debates pop up occasionally about whether you should play with Flash on D or F. An interesting thing of note is that the top Korean pros play with Flash on F while the top LCS (NA) pros play with Flash on D. Additionally, arguably the greatest LoL player of all time and four-time world champion, T1’s Lee’ Faker’ Sang-hyeok, plays with Flash on F. When asked about his opinion on Flash on D or F, Faker compares those who play with Flash on D to those who enjoy mint chocolate.
T1 endorse Flash on F
© Colin Young-Wolff / Riot Games
B (back)
This is the Recall function all players have that allows them to instantly return to their base after standing still and channelling the spell for a total of eight seconds. You can access this by pressing the Recall button right by your champion’s portrait or just by pressing the B key on your keyboard. Any damage or displacement will cancel the recall and require them to start the process again.
RGB everything
This is a popular meme in PC gaming because of the trend to give hardware the ability to change colors, be it mice, keyboards, headsets, GPUs, and even mousepads. The trend got so ridiculous that gaming gear companies started releasing things with an RGB function just for the sake of it. The term means Red Green Blue and is used in many areas, but it functions as a meme specifically for PC gaming.
Creeps (and CS)
This term counts the number of lane minions and jungle monsters a player has killed. This is important to keep track of because it is a direct way to compare how the laners and the junglers are stacking up against each other. A higher CS/min score usually means you won lane unless you lose a bunch of early 1v1s. About 15 minions are generally worth the same amount of gold as a solo kill.
1-3-1 and 1-4
Some terms go hand-in-hand with split-pushing (pushing multiple lanes as a team). 1-3-1 is a setup where three team-mates push mid while the other two push the top and bottom lanes. This tactic works well if both solo-lane players have their Teleport summoner ability ready. 1-4 is similar, but it has four members pushing mid (usually to set up vision around map objectives) and one pushing a solo lane, to draw attention to the person who is alone so that the other four team-mates can trade the kill for an important objective, tower or inhibitor.
EU > NA
This is a phrase that has been synonymous with Western LoL since Europe’s world championship win in season 1. For the majority of this game, Europe has been a league or two ahead of North America and recent events will back that up with Europe making world finals two years in a row in 2018 and 2019 and semis this year in 2020. North America, on the other hand, struggles to make it out of the group stages most years.
ELO
This rating system is used in many games (including chess) to determine a player’s skill relative to the general player base. Those with higher ELO have a better chance of making it pro. A term used often with ELO is MMR or Matchmaking Rank, though it is important to note that these two can be different things entirely.
What a very high ELO looks like
© Colin Young-Wolff / Riot Games
Getting your penta stolen
One of the worst feelings in the game is popping off in a team fight and hearing the announcer call out a triple kill followed by a quadra kill just to have a team-mate land the final blow and steal all your glory. A penta kill is when you kill the entire enemy team before any of them respawn, which doesn’t happen often. No such in-game achievements exist outside of your rank, so penta kills are always a beautiful thing. Getting a penta kill is the ultimate ego boost and gives you many bragging rights, so getting it stolen from your team-mate is one of the biggest forms of betrayal in LoL.
Facechecking
This means to enter a bush, the enemy jungle, or the Fog of War without vision of the enemy team. The risk this poses is great, but can also provide a lot of great, relevant information to your team if you ward the area and set up vision. But facechecking often comes with its disasters, as most LoL players can attest. Weigh the risk before you decide to check that bush and decide whether or not you can even take that fight if things go sour.
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