The following is a glossary of traditional English-language terms used in the three overarching cue sports disciplines: ''

carom billiards Carom billiards, sometimes called carambole billiards, is the overarching title of a family of cue sports generally played on cloth-covered, billiard tables. In its simplest form, the object of the game is to score or "counts" by ' one's o ...

'' referring to the various games played on a

billiard table A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which cue sports are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables (whether for carom billiards, pool, pyramid or snooker) provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that ...

without ; ''

pool Pool may refer to: Water pool * Swimming pool, usually an artificial structure containing a large body of water intended for swimming * Reflecting pool, a shallow pool designed to reflect a structure and its surroundings * Tide pool, a rocky po ...

'', which denotes a host of games played on a table with six pockets; and '' snooker'', played on a large pocket table, and which has a sport culture unto itself distinct from pool. There are also games such as

English billiards English billiards, called simply billiards in the United Kingdom and in many former British colonies, is a cue sport that combines the aspects of carom billiards and pool. Two (one white and one yellow) and a red are used. Each player or team ...

that include aspects of multiple disciplines.

Definitions and language

The term "" is sometimes used to refer to all of the cue sports, to a specific class of them, or to specific ones such as English billiards; this article uses the term in its most generic sense unless otherwise noted. The labels "

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

" and " UK" as applied to entries in this glossary refer to terms originating in the UK and also used in countries that were fairly recently part of the

British Empire The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts e ...

and/or are part of the

Commonwealth of Nations The Commonwealth of Nations, simply referred to as the Commonwealth, is a political association of 56 member states, the vast majority of which are former territories of the British Empire. The chief institutions of the organisation are the ...

, as opposed to US (and, often,

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

) terminology. The terms "American" or "US" as applied here refer generally to North American usage. However, due to the predominance of US-originating terminology in most internationally competitive

(as opposed to snooker), US terms are also common in the pool context in other countries in which English is at least a minority language, and US (and borrowed French) terms predominate in

. Similarly, British terms predominate in the world of snooker,

, and blackball, regardless of the players' nationalities. The term "blackball" is used in this glossary to refer to both blackball and eight-ball pool as played in the UK, as a shorthand. Blackball was chosen because it is less ambiguous ("eight-ball pool" is too easily confused with the international standardized " eight-ball"), and blackball is globally standardized by an

International Olympic Committee The International Olympic Committee (IOC; french: link=no, Comité international olympique, ''CIO'') is a non-governmental sports organisation based in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is constituted in the form of an association under the Swiss ...

-recognized

governing body A governing body is a group of people that has the authority to exercise governance over an organization or political entity. The most formal is a government, a body whose sole responsibility and authority is to make binding decisions in a taken ...

, the

World Pool-Billiard Association The World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) is the international governing body for pool (pocket billiards). It was formed in 1987, and was initially headed by a provisional board of directors consisting of representatives from Australia, Americas ...

(WPA); meanwhile, its ancestor, eight-ball pool, is largely a folk game, like North American , and to the extent that its rules have been codified, they have been done so by competing authorities with different rulesets. (For the same reason, the glossary's information on eight-ball, nine-ball, and ten-ball draws principally on the stable WPA rules, because there are many competing amateur leagues and even professional tours with divergent rules for these games.) Foreign-language terms are generally not within the scope of this list, unless they have become an integral part of billiards terminology in English (e.g. ), or they are crucial to meaningful discussion of a game not widely known in the English-speaking world.