Reddit Terms and Slang: The Glossary, Checked Against Reddit Help

Most Reddit glossaries copy each other.

You can tell, because they all carry the same outdated entries. They still call it crossposting when Reddit renamed it. They describe the shadowban as if it were still Reddit’s standard punishment. And almost none of them mention the terms that decide whether your post is even allowed to appear.

So we rebuilt the list from the source. Every definition below was checked against Reddit’s own Help Center where an official definition exists, and against Wiktionary or the tool’s own documentation where it does not.

The short answer: the Reddit terms you will meet first are r/ (a community, called a subreddit), u/ (a user), OP (original poster), upvote and downvote (votes that rank content), karma (a score built from those votes) and flair (a tag on a post or username). The most common slang is TL;DR (summary), TIL (today I learned), ELI5 (explain like I’m five) and AMA (ask me anything). Advice subreddits add their own layer: DH (dear husband), SO (significant other), MIL (mother-in-law), NC (no contact). If you plan to post as a brand, add four more: account age, karma requirements, the 10% rule and AutoModerator.

Reddit basics: the words on every page

Term	What it means
Subreddit	A community dedicated to one topic. Reddit’s Help Center simply calls it “another name for a community”.
r/	The prefix for a subreddit. r/marketing is the marketing community.
u/	The prefix for a user. u/spez is the username of Reddit’s CEO.
Post	A submission to a subreddit: text, link, image, video or poll.
Comment	A reply under a post or under another comment.
Thread	A post and its comments, or one chain of replies inside it.
Upvote / downvote	The arrows next to every post and comment. An upvote says the content contributes to the community, a downvote says it does not. Votes decide what rises.
Score	Upvotes minus downvotes. Some communities hide scores for a while after a post goes up, so early votes do not sway later ones. What actually earns votes is covered in our guide on getting upvotes on Reddit.
Karma	A score that reflects the votes your posts and comments receive. Reddit says it is “an approximate reflection”, so upvotes and karma do not map 1:1. Split into post karma and comment karma.
Cake day	The anniversary of the day you signed up. A small cake icon appears next to your name.
Home feed	Your personalized feed, built from the communities you joined. Older users still call it the front page.
r/all and r/popular	Sitewide feeds of what is trending across communities. “Top of r/all” means a post blew up.
Sort	How a feed is ordered: Hot (score plus freshness), New, Top (highest score over a period), Rising, Controversial, and Best for comments.
Award	A badge you give a post or comment to recognize it. Paid awards are bought with Gold and can help eligible recipients earn cash through Reddit’s Contributor Program.
Gold	Reddit’s virtual currency, used to give awards. In Reddit’s Help Center, 100 Gold costs $1.99 on mobile and $1.79 on the web (prices checked in October 2026). Gilded means a piece of content received an award.
Custom feed	A feed that groups several subreddits together. Formerly called a multireddit.

Community and culture terms

• OP: original poster, the person who created the post. Also used for the post itself. Reddit shows an OP label when the author replies in their own thread.
• OC: original content. Something the poster made, not found elsewhere.
• Repost: two meanings, and that confuses people. Officially, reposting is Reddit’s newer name for crossposting (see below). In slang, “repost” is an accusation: you resubmitted content that was already popular, usually to farm karma.
• Crosspost (x-post): sharing a post from one community into another. Reddit’s newer help pages call this reposting, “formerly known as crossposting”.
• Lurker: someone who reads Reddit but never posts or comments.
• Throwaway: a temporary account used to post something personal without linking it to your main one.
• Megathread: one big pinned thread that gathers all discussion on a topic, to avoid dozens of duplicate posts.
• Karma farming: posting content only to collect karma. Reddit’s spam policy names “repeatedly posting or sharing old content for the purpose of rapidly gaining karma” as a violation.
• AMA: ask me anything, a thread where someone invites the community to question them. The original community is r/IAmA. Variants: AUA (ask us anything) and AMAA (ask me almost anything). We cover how brands should run one in our Reddit AMA guide.
• Reddiquette: Reddit’s informal etiquette, “written by users themselves”. Its first line: remember the human.

Reddit abbreviations and slang

The acronyms below are the ones Reddit lists in its own Help Center page of Reddit expressions, plus a few community classics.

Abbreviation	Stands for	How it is used
TL;DR	Too long; didn’t read	Introduces a short summary of a long post.
TIL	Today I learned	Shares a fact you just discovered. Has its own subreddit, r/todayilearned.
ELI5	Explain like I’m five	Asks for a very simple explanation.
AMA	Ask me anything	An open Q&A thread with a person or a team.
CMV	Change my view	States an opinion and invites people to argue against it.
TIFU	Today I f*cked up	Tells the story of a personal mistake.
IIRC	If I recall correctly	Flags a fact quoted from memory.
IMO / IMHO	In my opinion / in my humble (or honest) opinion	Marks an opinion.
IANAL	I am not a lawyer	Disclaimer before legal-sounding advice. IANAD: not a doctor.
[Serious]	Serious responses only	Title tag used in r/AskReddit to ban joke answers.
NSFW	Not safe for work	Explicit or mature content. Reddit requires it to be marked.
Spoiler	n/a	A tag that hides text and media until the reader chooses to reveal them.

Relationship and advice subreddit acronyms

Advice communities such as r/relationship_advice, r/AmItheAsshole and r/JUSTNOMIL have their own shorthand, and the posts are unreadable without it. Meanings below follow Wiktionary and the communities’ own usage.

Abbreviation	Meaning
34F, 36M	Age and gender, written after each person in a title: “My (34F) husband (36M)”.
DH / DW	Dear (or darling) husband / dear wife.
DS / DD	Dear son / dear daughter.
SO	Significant other: a partner, whatever the status.
BF / GF	Boyfriend / girlfriend.
MIL / FIL	Mother-in-law / father-in-law.
SIL / BIL	Sister-in-law (sometimes sibling-in-law) / brother-in-law.
NC / LC / VLC	No contact / low contact / very low contact: how far someone has cut a family member out of their life.
AITA	Am I the ahole. Verdicts: NTA (not the ahole), YTA (you’re the ahole), ESH (everyone sucks here), NAH (no aholes here).
WIBTA	Would I be the a**hole: the same question, asked before acting.
AIO	Am I overreacting, from r/AmIOverreacting.
UPDATE	A follow-up post where OP tells what happened next, usually linking the first one.
OOP	Original original poster. In repost communities like r/BestofRedditorUpdates, OP is the person reposting and OOP is the person who wrote the story.

Moderation and safety terms

This is the part of the vocabulary that decides whether your content stays up.

• Mod (moderator): a volunteer who runs a subreddit and enforces its rules. Mods are users, not Reddit employees.
• Admin: a Reddit employee. Admins enforce the sitewide Reddit Rules and carry an [A] tag next to their name.
• Reddit Rules: the sitewide content policy. Every subreddit adds its own rules on top, usually in the sidebar.
• Sidebar / community info: the panel with a subreddit’s description, rules and links. Read it before posting.
• AutoModerator (automod): a moderation tool built into Reddit. Mods write rules that automatically act on new posts and comments: remove them, filter them for review, add a flair or reply. It can check an author’s karma, account age and Contributor Quality Score. It works only on new content, never on old posts.
• Mod queue: the list of reported or filtered content waiting for a moderator’s decision.
• Modmail: the shared inbox of a subreddit’s mod team. The right place to ask why a post was removed.
• Removed vs deleted: [removed] means a mod or a filter took the content down. [deleted] means the author did.
• Locked: no new comments allowed. Members can still vote and edit their existing comments.
• Archived: if a community has archiving on, posts older than six months are archived automatically. Nobody can vote or comment on them anymore.
• Sticky (pinned, highlighted): a post fixed at the top of a subreddit. Mods can highlight up to six posts.
• Flair: a tag. Post flair categorizes a post (Question, Discussion, Case study). User flair sits next to a username in one community and can mark verified experts. Many subreddits require post flair before you can submit.
• Public, restricted, private: community types. Restricted means anyone can read but only approved members can post or comment. Private means only approved members can even read.
• Approved user: a member the mods have whitelisted. Approved users bypass some filters.
• Ban: a mod decision that blocks you from one subreddit.
• Suspension: an admin decision that blocks you from the whole site, temporarily or permanently.
• Shadowban: a ban that hides your activity without telling you. In November 2015, Reddit replaced user shadowbans with announced account suspensions. What people call a shadowban today is usually the spam filter, a subreddit’s AutoModerator rule, or one of the safety filters mods can switch on (reputation filter, Crowd Control). We break down the five different cases in our shadowban guide.
• Spam filter: Reddit’s automated system that removes or hides content it judges spammy, often without a notification.
• Ban evasion: using another account to keep participating in a community that banned you. It violates the Reddit Rules and can lead to a sitewide suspension. If you are unsure whether you were banned or just filtered, the shadowban guide above walks through the test.
• Crowd Control: a setting that collapses or filters content from people who are not yet trusted members of the community. From the outside, it looks like a shadowban (see the guide above).
• Brigading: users from one community flooding another to vote or comment en masse. Treated as interference by Reddit.
• Vote manipulation: any attempt to inflate votes, including buying them or voting from several accounts. Banned sitewide.
• Reddit Pro: Reddit’s set of tools for businesses: an official business profile, plus features to follow conversations about your brand and track how your posts perform. More in our Reddit Pro guide.

Reddit terms that matter if you market on Reddit

Most glossaries stop before this part. These are the terms that decide whether a brand’s post is seen, filtered or banned.

Account age. How long ago the account was created. Many subreddits set a minimum before you can post. Reddit’s Poster Eligibility Guide confirms communities can require a minimum account age, a minimum karma and a verified email, and says the exact thresholds “aren’t disclosed at this time to deter potential misuse”. A brand-new account posting on day one is the profile spam filters are built to catch. We explain why age alone does not fix it, and why buying an old account backfires, in our guide on aged Reddit accounts.

Karma requirements. Minimum karma to post or comment in a community. They can apply to post karma, comment karma, combined karma, or karma earned inside that specific subreddit. That last one surprises people: a high total does not open every door.

Poster Eligibility Guide. The pop-up Reddit shows when you try to post somewhere you are not allowed yet. It tells you which criteria you miss (age, karma, verified email) without giving the numbers. The help page linked above says it reads the community’s AutoModerator settings and updates every six hours.

Verified email. Some communities require it. It is also one of the account security signals Reddit uses to score accounts. Verify it before anything else.

Contributor Quality Score (CQS). Reddit’s internal score of how likely an account is to contribute positively, built from account history, network signals and security steps such as email verification. It places every account in one of five tiers, from highest to lowest. It is not shown on your profile. You only see it when posts get filtered. We cover how it filters you, and what moves it, in our shadowban guide.

Self-promotion. Promoting something you own or benefit from. Reddit’s spam policy does not ban it outright, but asks you to post “authentic content into communities where you have a personal interest”, and to be careful about posting frequency if your contributions are mostly links to your own business. Each subreddit sets its own line, from “allowed on Fridays” to “instant ban”.

The 10% rule (or 90/10 rule). The classic self-promotion ratio: no more than 10% of your posts and comments in a community should be self-promotional, the other 90% genuine participation. Some guides say it was retired years ago. It is still in Reddit’s own moderator help, described as a rule that “other communities abide by”. It is a community rule, not a sitewide one. Check each subreddit’s sidebar. How to stay inside it while still getting results is the core of a sound Reddit marketing strategy.

Flair (for brands). Two practical points. Some communities reject any post without the right post flair, and AutoModerator removes it silently. And some offer a verified or company user flair: if it exists, use it. Disclosing who you are costs less than being caught.

AutoModerator (for brands). Assume every large subreddit runs filters on new accounts, low karma, links to certain domains and promotional keywords. When a post disappears with no reply and no vote, automod is a more likely culprit than a ban.

Bot Bouncer. An open-source moderation app built on Reddit’s Developer Platform that subreddits install to ban bots. Accounts are classified on r/BotBouncer by a mix of automated checks, which include the account’s post and comment history, and human review. Once an account is classified, it is banned or filtered in every subreddit running the app, not just one. Its scope covers karma-farming bots and “certain accounts involved in inauthentic promotional activity”. A person promoting a product “in a human manner” is out of scope. Appeals go to r/BotBouncer’s modmail.

Post Check. A Reddit feature, documented on that same Poster Eligibility help page, that uses an AI model to review your draft against the community’s rules before you submit, and highlights possible violations. It does not block you. Fix what it flags.

Reddit Answers. Reddit’s AI search: ask a question in the search bar and it summarizes real posts and comments, with inline citations to the threads it used.

AI citations. Not a Reddit term, but the one we care about most: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews quote Reddit threads constantly, and in what we track, a post’s upvotes do not predict whether it gets cited. What does predict it is covered in our Reddit SEO guide.

Query fan-out. What an AI assistant does with a question before it searches: it splits it into several shorter sub-queries. In what we track, one question becomes 5 to 15 of them, depending on the model, so “best CRM for a five-person startup” turns into searches like “CRM for early stage startup” or “free CRM 2026”. A Reddit title that matches one sub-query word for word is the one most likely to get picked up. This is the mechanism behind our work on getting brands cited by AI engines.

Product placement post. Our name for a post built around a real experience or problem, where the product comes up in passing among other options, as opposed to a “best tool for X” post built around the product. It reads like a contribution, not an ad, which is why communities tolerate it far more readily. It is not a license to hide who you are: if you are affiliated with the product, say so, as many subreddits require.

The terms most glossaries get wrong

Three corrections, all from Reddit’s own help pages:

1. Crossposting is now called reposting. Same feature, new name, as Reddit’s reposting help page states (its older expressions page still says crosspost). Reposting into unrelated communities is flagged as spammy behavior.
2. “Shadowban” is mostly a misnomer. Reddit moved to announced suspensions in 2015. Silent removals today come from filters, not from a secret account ban.
3. The 10% rule is not dead. Reddit still documents it, as a choice each community makes.

Reddit terms in 30 seconds

• Basics: r/ is a community, u/ is a user, OP is the original poster, karma is an approximate score built from your votes, flair is a tag.
• Slang: TL;DR is a summary, TIL is a new fact, ELI5 asks for a simple explanation, AMA is an open Q&A, CMV invites debate, IANAL is a disclaimer.
• Moderation: mods run one subreddit, admins run the site. A ban is local, a suspension is sitewide, and most “shadowbans” are filters.
• For marketers: account age, karma requirements, verified email and CQS decide whether you can post. The 10% rule and each subreddit’s self-promotion rules decide whether you stay.
• For AI visibility: votes do not predict citations. Titles that match an AI’s sub-queries (query fan-out) do most of the work.

Before you post, read the sidebar of every community you plan to post in, because each one adds its own vocabulary on top.