// LOADING OSUMAUK
// LOADING OSUMAUK
A plain-English glossary of the osu! shorthand you will see in chat, on stream, and on leaderboards: scoring and play terms (UR, FC, SS, choke, miss), every common mod (NM, HD, HR, DT, FL, EZ, NF), the four difficulty settings (AR, OD, CS, HP), pattern and tapping vocabulary (jumps, streams, tech, alt, singletap), and the words for beatmap status and the rank chase (ranked, loved, graveyard, snipe, farm).
By OSUMAUK Staff
osu! has a dense private vocabulary, and most of it is never spelled out for newcomers. Someone will type "FC'd the DT diff, 145 UR, choked an SS on the last stream" and expect you to follow. This glossary decodes the terms you will actually encounter, grouped into the categories they belong to: scoring and play, mods, difficulty settings, patterns and tapping, and beatmap status plus the rank-chase slang. Wherever a value is involved, it refers to the osu! (standard) mode.
These describe how a single play went — whether it was clean, how steady your timing was, and where you broke.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| pp | Performance points — the skill-based value awarded for a score on a ranked map. Your weighted total drives your global rank. |
| FC (Full Combo) | A play with the maximum possible combo — no misses and no sliderbreaks. Does not by itself imply high accuracy; you can FC with a low grade. |
| SS / X | A perfect-accuracy play: every note hit for the maximum 300. The top grade. |
| S | Over 90% 300s, under 1% 50s, and no misses. One tier below SS. |
| A / B / C / D | Descending grades based mostly on the percentage of 300s landed and miss count; D is the lowest. |
| SH / SSH (silver S / SS) | The same S or SS grade earned while using a visibility mod (Hidden or Flashlight). Shown with a silver tint to mark the harder conditions. |
| Miss | A note that was not hit in time. A single miss breaks combo and rules out an FC. |
| Choke | Almost achieving a full combo but breaking it late in the map — the most painful way to lose a run. |
| UR (Unstable Rate) | A measure of how consistent your tap timing was: the standard deviation of your hit errors in milliseconds, multiplied by 10. Lower is steadier; high UR means your hits are scattered around the perfect timing. |
A common point of confusion: an FC is about combo (no breaks), while a grade like SS is about accuracy (no inaccurate hits). You can FC a map and still only get an A if your accuracy was loose, and you can never SS a map that you choked.
Mods are toggles applied before a play that change difficulty (and sometimes the pp multiplier). Some increase challenge, some reduce it.
| Acronym | Mod | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| NM | NoMod | No mods enabled — a vanilla play. Often used to describe a default leaderboard or score. |
| HD | Hidden | Removes approach circles and fades hit objects out shortly after they appear, forcing you to read timing from memory and rhythm. |
| HR | Hard Rock | Raises difficulty across the board — roughly +30% circle size scaling and +40% to approach rate, overall difficulty, and HP drain — and flips the map vertically. |
| DT | Double Time | Speeds the song up to 1.5x, shortening it and effectively raising AR, OD, and the tapping demand. The classic farm/speed mod. |
| FL | Flashlight | Limits the visible area of the screen to a small circle around the cursor, hiding most of the map. |
| EZ | Easy | Halves the difficulty settings (CS, AR, OD, HP drain) to make a map more forgiving. A difficulty-reduction mod. |
| NF | No Fail | Disables failing so you always finish the map; multiplies score by 0.5. A difficulty-reduction mod. |
Every beatmap is tuned with four numeric settings, each ranging from 0 to 10. Mods like HR and EZ work by shifting these values. Knowing what each one does helps you read a map at a glance.
| Setting | Name | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| AR | Approach Rate | How early hit objects fade in before they must be hit. Higher AR = objects appear for less time, so you react faster and read less ahead. |
| OD | Overall Difficulty | How strict the timing windows are. Higher OD = you must be more precise to score 300s, so high accuracy is harder. |
| CS | Circle Size | The physical size of the hit circles. Higher CS = smaller circles, demanding more cursor precision. |
| HP | HP Drain | How fast your health bleeds and how harshly misses are punished. Higher HP = a single bad patch can fail you. |
These describe the shapes maps throw at you and how players physically tap them. They show up constantly when people discuss what a map demands or what they are practising.
Finally, the words for where a map sits in its lifecycle — which decides whether it awards pp — plus the slang players use for grinding the leaderboard.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Ranked | A map approved as official content. It has leaderboards and awards pp. This is the only common status (alongside Approved) that gives pp. |
| Loved | A community-voted map that may not meet ranking criteria. It has a leaderboard but awards no pp, and its scores are wiped if it leaves Loved. |
| Qualified | A map nominated and waiting in the ranking queue. It has a leaderboard but awards no pp yet, and scores are deleted when it moves to Ranked. |
| Pending / WIP | A freshly submitted map awaiting nomination. It contributes to play counts but has no leaderboard and gives no pp. |
| Graveyard | A pending map left un-updated for several weeks and automatically shelved. Still playable, but inactive and pp-less. |
| Farm | A map that gives unusually high pp for its real difficulty — players grind these to inflate their top plays. "Farming" is the act of doing so. |
| Snipe | Beating another player's score on a leaderboard, especially taking their #1. "Sniping" is hunting specific players' top scores. |
| Retry | Restarting a map immediately (often via a quick-retry key) to attempt a cleaner run, rather than finishing a play that has already gone wrong. |
The big takeaway for pp: only Ranked (and Approved) maps pay out. You can pour hours into Loved or Qualified leaderboards and post world-class scores, but your global rank will not move a single point.
Keep this page bookmarked for your first few weeks. Once "choked the FC, 130 UR, sniping a farm map on HDDT" reads as a normal English sentence, you have effectively learned the language of osu!.