This is a dictionary of terms in use by the players of MUD. Although biased towards MUD2, most of the entries would make sense to MUD1 players - indeed some of them hail exclusively from MUD1. As virtually all multi-user adventure games are descendents of MUD1, many of the words and phrases are in common use in other such games, too.

Entries appear in case-insensitive alphanumerical order (as if numbers were appended to the end of the alphabet); non-alphanumerics are ignored for ordering purposes. Words are spelled as in British (well, all non-American) English, although in cases where the usage is exclusively American this fact is noted.

This HTML version of the MUDspeke dictionary was created from Richard Bartle's ASCII original. While every effort was made to reproduce the use of boldface, italics, and hot links faithfully, a few errors were undoubtedly introduced. Please send your reports of erroneous or missing links, incorrect capitalisation or use of the wrong typeface to sysop@mud2.com.

In the HTML version, the following lexicographical conventions were used: each entry begins with a single line containing the term in boldface as normally written, with upper/lower case significance; following this are definitions, which, if there is more than one, are numbered in round brackets; definitions begin on new lines, are indented, and after their number (if any) begin with the part of speech in italics; after the part of speech, the term is defined in English; references to other entries in the dictionary are hot links, except where they occur within quotation marks. Parts of speech use normal grammatical terminology, except that rather than saying verbs are intransitive or transitive, this concept is represented by an integer expressing the number of extra 'parameters' the verb needs: intransitive verbs are therefore verb⁰, and transitive verbs are verb¹, verb² etc. The construct verb¹² means it can take either 1 or 2 extra parameters.

Note that there is no pronunciation guide, as these terms are always written down. Sometimes some indication of how other people think they should be spoken can be observed, eg. you may see either 'a MUA' or 'an MUA', but it's not really all that important - use whatever you find most intuitive.

In referencing entries which can be extended, the protocol adopted herein is to boldface only the referenced part and leave the rest unaffected where possible, eg. the present participle of 'dr' is 'dring'. However, in cases where the original entry is not a contiguous subset of the letters in the modified form, the whole word is boldfaced, eg. 'make' would be 'making. For compound phrases with intervening words, only those words which are defined are boldfaced, as in 'building a killer up' (where 'build up' is the current term and 'killer' has a definition). If a compound phrase is a hot link, intervening words are also part of the link, as in 'building a killer up' as it would appear under the definition of 'killer'.

A small number of entries need to be fleshed out with specific information before they can be used. The nature of the information is enclosed in angle brackets: 'make <level>' means that <level> should be substituted for some appropriate level referent, eg. a level name or bound pronoun. Finally, there is the question of whether entries in this dictionary should be definitive (ie. the definitions are the only correct ones) or reflective (ie. formally incorrect but commonly-used meanings are also given). The solution adopted is to include reflective definitions while drawing attention to the fact that there are alternative meanings which longer-standing players (eg. wizzes) may prefer. As for the completeness of this dictionary, it is the nature of evolving slangs that they change very rapidly, and it therefore goes without saying that.