01The business itself
The oldest words in the trade describe the one fact it was built to conceal: that the outcomes are agreed in advance. Most of these terms descend from the carnival midways where wrestling was staged as a sideshow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they still carry the carny habit of saying one thing so the audience hears another.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Kayfabe | The presentation of staged events as genuine, and the discipline of keeping that fiction intact — in the ring, in interviews and, in the old days, in public at all times. Carny slang of uncertain origin; often explained as a coded form of “be fake.” To “break kayfabe” is to acknowledge the fiction. |
| Work | Anything staged. A “worked” match has a predetermined outcome; to “work” a crowd is to manipulate its reaction on purpose. The whole business is a work. |
| Shoot | The opposite of a work: something real. A shoot fight is a legitimate contest; a shoot interview is one where the wrestler speaks out of character. A “worked shoot” is a scripted segment built to look like an unscripted one. |
| Mark | A fan who believes, or behaves as if they believe, that what they are watching is real. Carnival term for the customer to be fleeced. Used more gently now, sometimes affectionately. |
| Smark | A “smart mark”: a fan who knows the business is staged and follows it with that knowledge, often through insider news. Coined with some contempt, adopted with some pride. |
02Who is who
Every match needs someone to cheer and someone to boo, and every promotion needs people to decide which is which. The terms below describe the roles, on the card and behind it.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Face (babyface) | The hero: a wrestler booked to be cheered. Called a “blue-eye” in Britain and a “técnico” in Mexico. |
| Heel | The villain: a wrestler booked to be booed. Almost certainly from the general slang for a contemptible person. |
| Tweener | A wrestler positioned between face and heel, drawing mixed reactions by design. |
| Jobber | A wrestler whose role is to lose — to “do the job” — so that an established wrestler looks strong. The polite modern term is “enhancement talent.” |
| Gimmick | A wrestler’s character, and the whole apparatus that signals it: name, costume, music, manner. Also, loosely, any prop or foreign object. |
| Booker | The person who decides match outcomes and writes the storylines. To “book” a card is to set its matches and results. |
03The crowd
The audience is the only honest party in the building, and the business measures itself by the noise it makes. A wrestler’s standing rises and falls on the words below.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pop | A sudden burst of cheering. A “cheap pop” is one earned by flattering the crowd — naming the city, for instance — rather than by anything that happened in the match. |
| Heat | Booing, or the hostility a heel generates; the more heat, the better the heel is doing. “Cheap heat” is earned by insulting the crowd or the town. Backstage, “heat” means real ill-feeling between colleagues. |
| Over | Accepted and reacted to by the crowd. A wrestler who is “over” draws a genuine response, face or heel; “getting over” is the goal of every performer. |
| Push | A deliberate campaign by the booker to raise a wrestler’s standing through wins, screen time and strong storylines. |
| Bury | The reverse: to lower a wrestler’s standing on purpose, through losses, squashes or humiliation. A “burial” is the result. |
| Turn | A switch from face to heel or heel to face. A “double turn” is when both wrestlers in a match swap roles at once. |
04Inside the match
A wrestling match is a collaboration presented as a fight. The vocabulary of the ring is mostly about the mechanics of that collaboration — what is planned, what hurts, and how to make the audience feel it.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Spot | A planned move or sequence within a match. A “high spot” is a dramatic, usually aerial or high-risk one. A match that is nothing but high spots is dismissed as a “spot-fest.” |
| Bump | To fall, usually to the mat, in a way that looks and sounds painful. The standard “flat back bump” lands the whole back at once to spread the impact. Taking bumps is the fundamental skill of the trade. |
| Sell | To react to an opponent’s offence as though it hurt — limping, staggering, clutching the injured part — so the audience believes it. Selling is most of the acting in wrestling. |
| No-sell | To ignore an opponent’s move entirely, either as a deliberate show of toughness or, when unplanned, as a professional insult. |
| Botch | A move or a line that goes wrong through error — a missed catch, a slipped hold, a forgotten cue. |
| Stiff | Applied with more genuine force than necessary. A stiff worker hits hard; a “potato” is a single strike that lands for real, on purpose or otherwise. |
| Near fall | A pin attempt broken at the last moment — the count reaches two and the shoulder comes up. The basic unit of drama in a match. |
| Hot tag | In a tag match, the moment the beaten-down face finally reaches a fresh partner, who comes in fast. It follows the “face in peril” sequence and usually draws the biggest pop of the match. |
| Gaga | Comedy, nonsense or gimmickry in a match or segment; carny slang, usually spoken with a sigh. Wrestlers who dislike storyline clutter call it gaga. |
05The story around it
Matches are the sentences; the storyline is the paragraph. These terms describe how a promotion builds a reason for two people to fight, and how it decides who wins.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Angle | A storyline. Traditionally begins with one wrestler attacking or insulting another, and proceeds to revenge. |
| Run-in | An unscheduled entrance by a wrestler not in the match, usually to interfere and usually to set up the next angle. |
| Screwjob | A finish in which a wrestler loses by trickery, a corrupt official or a rule technicality. The 1997 Montreal Screwjob, in which a real double-cross was executed as a match finish, gave the word a second life. |
| Dusty finish | A finish in which the face appears to win a big match only for the decision to be reversed on a technicality afterwards. Named for the booker Dusty Rhodes, who used it often. |
| Card | The lineup of matches at a given show. A “dark match” is one held at a televised event but not broadcast; a “house show” is an event with no television at all. |
06Styles and blood
Wrestling is not one style but several, and some of the vocabulary marks the borders between them. It also has a small, frank set of words for the one thing in the ring that is not faked.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Strong style | A Japanese approach associated with Antonio Inoki and New Japan Pro-Wrestling: hard, full-contact strikes and a martial-arts bearing, with the aim of making a worked match look as much like a real fight as possible. |
| Hardcore | A style built on brawling and weapons — chairs, tables, ladders — with little technical wrestling. ECW made it a brand in the 1990s. |
| Deathmatch | The bloodiest form of hardcore: glass, barbed wire, light tubes, thumbtacks. Popular in Japan, Mexico and parts of the United States; CZW’s Tournament of Death is the American landmark. |
| Blading (juice) | A wrestler deliberately cutting themselves, usually on the forehead with a concealed razor fragment, to bleed and sell the opponent’s offence. Also “getting colour.” Blood drawn “hardway” comes from a real blow instead. |
Questions people ask
- What does kayfabe mean?
- Kayfabe is the presentation of staged wrestling as real, and the code of keeping that fiction intact. The word is carnival slang of uncertain origin. Until the late 1980s wrestlers were expected to maintain kayfabe in public at all times; the discipline relaxed after WWE’s 1989 admission to New Jersey legislators that wrestling was entertainment.
- What is the difference between a face and a heel?
- A face, or babyface, is the wrestler the crowd is meant to cheer; a heel is the one it is meant to boo. Neither has anything to do with who wins — the booker decides that. A “tweener” sits between the two and draws mixed reactions on purpose.
- What is a mark in wrestling?
- A mark is a fan who believes, or acts as if they believe, that wrestling is real. The word is carnival slang for the customer to be fleeced. A “smark,” or smart mark, is a fan who knows the business is staged and follows it with that knowledge.
- What does it mean to sell in wrestling?
- To sell is to react to an opponent’s move as though it hurt, so the audience believes it did. Selling is the core acting skill of the trade. To no-sell is to ignore a move entirely, either as a planned display of toughness or, unplanned, as a snub to the opponent.
Sources
- Glossary of professional wrestling terms — Wikipedia
- Kayfabe — Wikipedia
- Professional wrestling — Wikipedia
Entered September 13, 2026. How this page is sourced: see the sources and method.