Fighting Game Terms: A Glossary of FGC Slang
Fighting games have their own language, and it can feel impenetrable from the outside — “just anti-air the jump-in, whiff punish the poke, and go for oki.” Learn a few dozen terms, though, and commentary and guides suddenly make sense. Here’s a practical glossary of the words that matter, grouped by what they’re about.
One note up front: the single best fighting-game reference on the internet is Infil’s Fighting Game Glossary, a community labor of love with over 800 entries, video clips, and Japanese translations. If you want the exhaustive version of any term below, that’s where to go. Consider this the friendly on-ramp.
Neutral and Spacing
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Neutral | The phase where nobody’s committed yet and both players maneuver for a favorable position to start offense. “Winning neutral” is finding that opening first. |
| Footsies | The mid-range battle to control the space between characters with grounded pokes, getting to your range while denying the opponent theirs. |
| Spacing | Deliberately managing distance so your attacks reach but the opponent’s don’t. |
| Poke | A quick, low-commitment normal thrown to check the opponent or contest space without over-extending. |
| Zoning | Controlling space from afar with projectiles and long normals, forcing the opponent to approach on your terms. |
| Whiff punish | Hitting an attack that missed during its recovery, before the opponent can act again. |
Frame Data
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Frame data | A move described in frames (1 frame = 1/60 of a second): how long it takes to hit, how long it can hit, and how long you’re stuck afterward. |
| Startup / Active / Recovery | Startup = frames before a move can hit; Active = frames it can connect; Recovery = frames after, before you can act again. |
| Plus / Minus on block | After a blocked move, who recovers first. “Plus” means the attacker acts first (advantage); “minus” means the defender does. |
| Safe / Unsafe | A blocked move is “safe” if it’s not negative enough to be punished, “unsafe” if the defender can guarantee a hit in response. |
| Counter hit | Hitting the opponent during their own move’s startup or active frames — usually extra damage and unique combo opportunities. |
Offense and Pressure
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Mixup | Attacking with two or more options the defender has to guess between — the classic being high vs. low, or strike vs. throw. |
| High / Low / Overhead | Attacks defined by how you block them: in 2D games, highs and overheads must be blocked standing, lows crouching. (In 3D fighters like Tekken the standing-block attack is a “mid,” and a “high” can be ducked entirely.) Forcing that guess is the heart of a mixup. |
| Cross-up | Hitting the opponent just after switching sides (usually a jump over their head), forcing them to flip their block direction. |
| Frame trap | Two attacks with a gap too small to interrupt — if the defender tries to press a button between them, they get counter-hit; blocking is safe. |
| Blockstring | A sequence of attacks done while the opponent blocks. A “true” blockstring has no gap to escape; others do. |
| Tick throw | Making the opponent block a fast, close attack, then immediately throwing them before they can react. |
Knockdowns and Okizeme
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Okizeme (oki) | Your offense and setups applied to a downed opponent as they get up, designed to control their options. |
| Wakeup | The moment a knocked-down character rises. A “wakeup DP” is a move done the instant you get up. |
| Meaty | An attack timed to catch the opponent on the first frame they rise — or on a later active frame for extra advantage. (Both meanings are in use.) |
| Reversal | A move input on the first possible frame out of blockstun or a knockdown, usually with an invincible attack to escape pressure. |
| DP (dragon punch) | A rising, usually-invincible uppercut (from Ryu’s Shoryuken). The archetypal anti-air and wakeup reversal. |
| Anti-air | Any move used to knock an opponent out of a jump before they can land an attack. |
Defense and Execution
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Hit-confirm | Starting an attack, visually confirming it hit (not blocked), and only then committing to the full combo — so a blocked one stays safe. |
| Tech | Two uses: breaking a throw by inputting throw during the grab, and recovering from a knockdown or in the air to reduce disadvantage. |
| Option select (OS) | One set of inputs that resolves into different outcomes depending on what the opponent does — the game picks the “right” answer for you. |
| Buffer | Inputting a move early, during another animation, so it comes out the first frame it’s able to. |
| Cancel | Interrupting a move’s recovery with another move (a special or super) to combo or keep pressure going — the backbone of combos. |
| Plink | Pressing two buttons about a frame apart to make hard, one-frame links more consistent. |
Modern Mechanics You’ll Hear in 2026
Today’s big titles each add their own system vocabulary on top of the universal terms above.
| Term | Game | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Drive System | Street Fighter 6 | A six-bar gauge powering both offense and defense; run it dry and you hit “Burnout,” a punished, vulnerable state. |
| Drive Impact | Street Fighter 6 | An armored attack that absorbs a hit and crumples the opponent — devastating in the corner. |
| Drive Rush | Street Fighter 6 | An enhanced forward dash that makes the follow-up attack more plus, fueling much of the game’s offense. |
| Roman Cancel | Guilty Gear Strive | Spending meter to cancel almost any move into an actionable state — extending combos or making unsafe moves safe. |
| Burst | Guilty Gear / BlazBlue | An invincible, no-damage blast used to escape an opponent’s combo. |
| Heat | Tekken 8 | A once-per-round power-up granting chip damage and enhanced moves, cashed out with a Heat Smash or Heat Dash. |
| Rollback netcode | All modern titles | Netcode that predicts inputs and quietly corrects, making online play feel close to offline. Now the industry standard. |
Same Word, Different Game
A few terms mean genuinely different things depending on the game, which is a common source of confusion:
- Reversal — in 2D games it’s an invincible wakeup escape; in Tekken and Virtua Fighter it means a counter or parry move.
- DI — in Street Fighter 6 it’s “Drive Impact”; in Super Smash Bros. it’s “Directional Influence,” a way to alter knockback. Totally different mechanics.
- Parry — Street Fighter 3’s tap-forward parry (free, pure timing) and SF6’s Drive Parry (hold block, spend meter to absorb) are both called “parries,” yet they work nothing alike — the term shifted meaning even within one franchise.
Fighting Game Terms FAQ
The terms newcomers ask about first.
Neutral is the phase where neither player has committed to offense and both are jockeying for a favorable position. “Winning the neutral” means finding your opening first.
A description of a move measured in frames (1/60 of a second each): how long it takes to hit, how long it stays active, how long you recover, and whether it’s plus or minus on block. It tells you what’s safe and what combos.
Short for okizeme — the offense and setups you apply to a knocked-down opponent as they wake up, aimed at controlling their get-up options.
Infil’s Fighting Game Glossary (glossary.infil.net) is the most complete reference available, with over a thousand terms, video examples, and translations. This page covers the essentials to get you started.
Nobody memorizes all of this at once — you pick it up one clip and one loss at a time. Keep this page handy, dig into Infil’s glossary when you want the deep version, and before long you’ll be the one explaining why that DP was unsafe on block.
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