LoL Terms Explained: The Ten Words That Change How You Play

Ten words your team uses as though everybody agreed on them, explained properly: tempo, peel, kiting, poke, split push, scaling, engage, wave management, vision and CS. The full A to Z lives in our glossary.

League of Legends Guide

The Terms That Matter

Words Nobody Defines

League runs on shorthand nobody stops to explain, and most of it gets learned by inference over several hundred games. These are the ten worth understanding properly, because each one changes a decision rather than just naming one.

Looking for a specific word?

This page covers the ten that change how you play. For every other piece of jargon in the game, from ADC to zoning, our full League of Legends terms glossary is the complete A to Z, and it's the page to bookmark.

CS Vision Wave Management Engage and Disengage Scaling and Split Push Kiting, Poke and Peel Tempo

CS

Creep score: the number of minions and monsters you've last hit. It's the cleanest measure of the thing that actually funds your items, and it's the number people quote when they mean "were you playing the game or watching it".

The reason it dominates every conversation about improvement is arithmetic rather than snobbery. An ordinary wave of three melee and three casters is 102 gold, the siege wave (every third one) adds a cannon worth 50 and rising, and the waves keep coming faster: every 30 seconds to start, every 25 from 14:00, every 20 from 30:00. Ten CS a minute you didn't take is an item you don't have at thirty.

Vision

What you can see and (more importantly) what you can't. A warded map lets you walk somewhere without gambling.

The habit worth building is checking before you move rather than after something goes wrong. If you don't know where the enemy jungler is and you can't see the river, you're rolling dice and calling the result unfair. It's also the cheapest improvement available: nothing else on this page costs seventy-five gold.

Wave management

Deciding where the minions meet, and the single largest gap between a good player and an average one. Freezing keeps the wave near your turret so the enemy has to overextend to farm. Slow pushing builds a big wave to crash later. Shoving means throwing it all in and taking the tempo instead.

It matters more than it sounds because of safety. A wave sitting outside your turret is an invitation for the enemy jungler, and a wave under it is a wall they'd have to walk through. Most ganks that felt unlucky were arranged by where somebody left the minions.

Engage and disengage

Engage is starting a fight on your terms. Disengage is refusing one on somebody else's. Most teamfights are decided before any damage happens, by which of those two went off first.

Know which your team is built for. A group with no engage can stand in front of an objective for four minutes without ever taking it, and a group with no disengage loses to a single well-timed catch. You can usually see which one you're missing in the loading screen.

Scaling and split pushing

A scaling champion is bad now and good later, which comes with an obligation nobody mentions: you have to survive the part where you're bad. This is the term that decides how you read your own losing lane. Down twenty CS at ten minutes on a scaling pick is a normal Tuesday; the same deficit on a champion whose plan was to win early is a real problem, and treating both the same way is a very common mistake.

Split pushing is being somewhere else on purpose (a side lane, a turret nobody is defending) so the enemy has to choose. It's a real strategy. Granted, it's also the excuse for half the games your top laner disappears for. The difference is whether anybody else knows it's happening, because a split push nobody is coordinating with is one person farming while four others fight.

Kiting, poke and peel

Kiting is attacking and moving in the same breath, so you're always shooting and never standing still. It sounds mechanical and it's really positional (the clicks matter less than ending up somewhere they can't reach). Almost every marksman is balanced on the assumption you can do it, so if you can't yet, the champion will feel weak when you're actually giving away half your damage.

Poke is chip damage from outside the range where anything bad can happen to you. It's the least dramatic way to win a lane and a very reliable one, because health doesn't come back on its own and eventually somebody has to leave.

Peel is keeping people off your carry: making it physically hard for anybody to reach the person about to do all the damage. New supports learn it about six months after they learn to engage, and that gap is where a lot of lost games live. It's simple to check. If your marksman is dead and you're alive, you probably went the wrong way.

Tempo

The word people use when they mean "who gets to do something next". Kill somebody and they're dead for fifteen seconds. That's fifteen seconds of tempo, and the only question is whether you spend it on an objective, a turret, or standing around.

Plenty of players climb a long way without ever saying it out loud. Junglers care most (their entire job is arriving somewhere before the other jungler can answer).

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Everything else

These ten are the ones that change a decision. The rest of League's vocabulary (and there's a lot of it) is collected and defined in our League of Legends Terms Glossary, which covers the whole alphabet in one place and is handy to keep open on a second screen for your first few weeks.

For two of the terms above in much greater depth, our vision guide covers warding properly, and our minions guide covers what a wave is actually worth.

Which term took you longest to figure out? Let us know in the comments below.