MUDSpeke Dictionary

MUDSpeke is the name given to the language spoken by MUD players. Select an option for more information, or go straight to the index if you want to look up a particular word.

Copyright (c) 1992 Richard Bartle, MUSE Ltd. 34 Grantham Road, Gt. Horkesley, Colchester, Essex, UK. CO6 4TU.

Introduction

 This is a dictionary of terms in use by the players of MUD. Although biased towards MUD2, most of the entries would make sense to MUD1 players - and some of them hail exclusively from MUD1. As virtually all multi-user adventure games are descendents of MUD1, many of the words and phrases are in common use in other such games, too.

Entries appear in case-insensitive alphanumerical order (as if numbers were appended to the end of the alphabet); non-alphanumerics are ignored for ordering purposes. Words are spelled as in British (indeed all non-American) English.

The lexicographical conventions which apply to the definitions are as follows: entries are separated by blank lines; each entry begins with a single line containing only the term being defined in boldface with upper/lower case significance; following this are definitions, which, if there is more than one, are numbered in round brackets; definitions begin on new lines, are indented, and after their number (if any) begin with the part of speech in italics; after the part of speech, the term is defined in English; references to other entries in the dictionary are highlighted as hypertext links, except where they occur within quotation marks.

Parts of speech use normal grammatical terminology, except that rather than saying verbs are intransitive or transitive, this concept is represented by an integer expressing the number of extra 'parameters' the verb needs: intransitive verbs are therefore verb/0, and transitive verbs are verb/1, verb/2 etc. The construct verb/1/2 means it can take either 1 or 2 extra parameters.

Note that there is no pronunciation guide, as these terms are always written down. Sometimes some indication of how other people think they should be spoken can be observed, eg. you may see either 'a MUA' or 'an MUA', but it's not really all that important - use whatever you find most intuitive.

In referencing entries which can be extended, the protocol adopted herein is to boldface only the referenced part and leave the rest unaffected where possible, eg. the present participle of 'dr' is 'dring'. However, in cases where the original entry is not a contiguous subset of the letters in the modified form, the whole word is boldfaced, eg. 'make' would be 'making'.

For compound phrases with intervening words, only those words which are defined are boldfaced, as in 'building a killer up' (where 'build up' and 'killer' have definitions).

A small number of entries need to be fleshed out with specific information before they can be used. The nature of the information is enclosed in angle brackets: 'make <level>' means that <level> should be substituted for some appropriate level referent, eg. a level name or bound pronoun.

Finally, there is the question of whether entries in this dictionary should be definitive (ie. the definitions are the only correct ones) or reflective (ie. commonly-used but formally incorrect uses are also given). The solution adopted is to include reflective definitions while drawing attention to the fact that there are alternative meanings which longer-standing players (eg. wizzes) may prefer. As for the completeness of this dictionary, it is the nature of evolving slangs that they change very rapidly, and it therefore goes without saying that .

Usage

 Obliged to communicate using ASCII text, MUD players have developed a series of conventions. Many of these extend across all comms communities, such as using smiley faces (like ':-)'), abbreviating common phrases (eg. 'by the way' as 'BTW'), and placing certain emotional flags in angle brackets ('<g>' = 'grin'). These will not be discussed here, as they're part of on-line culture in general. However, it should be noted that they're much less frequent in MUD than in, say, CB programs, as the community of MUD players is smaller and more tightly knit, with game-related jargon preferred.

MUD players tend to type a lot, and they therefore use lower case most of the time so they needn't keep hitting the shift keys. Although standard written English use of capitals is OK, eg. for proper nouns or the beginning of a sentence, anything else in upper case is definitely assumed to be there for a reason, generally being one of the following:

  1. A command. Since some commands have quotes in them, it can be confusing to use them when telling someone how to do something, so upper case is preferred instead; upper case itself can therefore be seen as a form of quoting when used in this fashion. "Try G T instead of GET TREASURE". In this context, the creation of participles is done non-destructively (in direct disregard of common English practice) to make it clear that what's being said is a MUD command, eg. "Try SLIDEing it".

  2. A minimum abbreviation. Many words in MUD can be shortened to a few key letters, and when explaining a command it is often the case that the letters comprising the abbreviation are capitalised leaving the rest in lower case. "If you can't spell her name, use the SYNonymise command". MUD itself uses this convention, and even (1) above when it's unavoidable.

  3. An acronym. There is some inconsistency here, with many people leaving well-known acronyms in lower case. However, acronyms are more commonly fully capitalised when extended somehow. "I was FODded for no good reason! No more MUDding for me until someone apologises".

  4. For emphasis. "You told him WHAT?!"

  5. A player, as opposed to a persona. If you don't know their real name (or whoever you're talking to doesn't), capitalising a persona name is taken to mean the player behind it. Player names can also be fully capitalised, though. "I was jumped by Flobble last night, I think it's ANCHOVY seeking revenge".

  6. A mistake. Someone hit the caps lock and didn't notice. It's polite to inform them of this, or to apologise if you do it and notice yourself. "So when I HEARD THIS I SAID oops caps lock that he was a selfish toad".

Note that because printed text can use boldface and italics, this dictionary does not itself adhere to these conventions except when giving quoted examples of usage during the process of definition.

Derivations

 Where sources for terms are known, these are given. This can lead to rather obscure or lengthy definitions, which you have permission to skip if you're not interested... Some of the more common ways that words arise will be discussed now.

Firstly, MUD players get quite fond of some of the inhabitants of the game, and give them pet names. These are normally generated by shortening the name a little and adding a 'y' or 'ie' at the end, as in 'draggy' for 'dragon'. Personae may have short nicknames, but they don't usually get the 'y' treatment.

MUD players are also acutely aware of gender, since most of them have personae of both sorts. They don't like referring generically to personae in a gender-specific fashion, especially when referring to experience levels, and therefore there have evolved three principal ways to reference personae of either sex.

The most laborious approach is to separate the alternatives by a '/', eg. 'Sir/Lady'. Since that can be rather long and lead to pluralisation problems, sometimes the male form is given with the feminine suffix following the '/', eg. 'enchanter/ess'. This is still unwieldy, so further contraction can be applied to yield a gender-free term which can be used generically, eg. 'wiz' for 'witch/wizard'. It's mostly level names on the standard career path which undergo the full surgery, with the glaring exception of 'hero/ine' (for which a suitable derivative has yet to find favour).

As usual in highly-interactive communities, nouns are often used as verbs and verbs as nouns. 'To MUD' means 'to play MUD'; 'Can I have a restore?' means 'Can you restore my persona?'. There are examples of this practice throughout the dictionary.

Another common way that terms arise is by back-formation (eg. 'fangling' meaning 'that which is newfangled'), but this is comparatively rare among MUD players. This may be because back-formation extends a term, rather than foreshortening it. There is some over-generalisation, eg. forming 'baloonatic' from 'baloon', but, again, these occur less often than a linguist might at first expect from a slang language.

The critical factor is the time it takes to type something, and when time is important then abbreviations and contractions reign. As MUD itself accepts a host of abbreviations covering pretty well everything you need (especially common verbs, nouns and prepositions), the practice is actively encouraged and becomes second-nature to the players; they sprinkle abbreviations, acronyms and contractions into their 'speech' with impunity, and may not even notice.

Finally, some words and phrases come from the actions or personality of individual players. These usages tend to be short-lived, disappearing when the player becomes inactive. Although 'how very Cynth' might have been meaningful to MUD1 players in 1982, it is only of minor historical interest now.

In the long term, all persona names are transient: for this reason, and to avoid offending players whose names are overlooked, no name-derived terms are included in this dictionary. The names used in examples are not intended to carry any such significance. Some real-world names are used, however, principally those of people historically associated with the actual development of MUD.

Starting points

 If you are looking up a specific MUD term, you can use the A-Z Index to quickly locate it. If you just want to browse instead, then here are some good places to start.

If you're more interested in the internal workings of MUD, then these entries may be of interest:

Acknowledgements

 Thanks are due to the many players who suggested items for inclusion in this dictionary. Particularly hefty contributions came from the following personae (in alphabetical order):

Trademarks

 Some of the words in this dictionary are trademarked to commercial companies. In order to avoid being hit for not saying so, the following trademarks are acknowledged - let's hope no-one has been missed out...

    Advanced D&D      TSR Ltd.
    Air Warrior       Kesmai Corporation
    Apricot           ACT plc.
    Archimedes        Acorn Computers Ltd.
    B-17              Boeing
    B-29              Boeing
    B-52              Boeing
    British Legends   CompuServe Inc. & MUSE Ltd.
    BT                British Telecommunications plc.
    CompuNet          CompuNet Ltd.
    CompuServe        CompuServe Inc.
    D&D               TSR Ltd.
    DEC-10            Digital Equipment Corporation
    Glaxo             Glaxo Group plc.
    IBM PC            International Business Machines
    M68020            Motorola Inc.
    Macro-10          Digital Equipment Corporation
    MS-DOS            Microsoft Corporation
    OS9               Microware Systems Corporation & Motorola Inc.
    Prestel           British Telecommunications plc.
    PR1ME             Prime Computers
    Sinclair          AMSTRAD plc.
    Spectrum          AMSTRAD plc.
    Turbo Pascal      Borland International Inc.
    Unix              AT&T
    VAX               Digital Equipment Corporation
    VMS               Digital Equipment Corporation
    Zork              Infocom
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