World of Tanks glossary

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By Lisa Anderson, responsible editor · Published 22 September 2026 · How we work

The shorthand you will meet in team chat, in guides and in patch notes, in plain English. Terms are listed alphabetically.

Term	What it means
Alpha	The damage one shell does when it penetrates. A high-alpha gun hits hard but usually reloads slowly.
Angling	Turning your hull away from the shooter so they meet a sloped plate instead of a flat one, multiplying the armour they have to defeat.
AP / APCR / HEAT / HE	The four shell families: solid armour-piercing shot, a faster sub-calibre round, a shaped charge, and high explosive. Explained with a diagram in the main article.
Arty	Self-propelled guns. Artillery. The most argued-about class in the game.
Bloom	The way your aiming circle expands when you move, turn the turret or fire, and shrinks again as you hold still. Firing before it shrinks is how most shots are wasted.
Bounce	A shot that hit but did not penetrate, dealing no damage. Usually the plate was too thick or too steeply angled.
Camo	Camouflage value — how hard your vehicle is to spot. Affected by hull size, movement, firing and foliage.
Credits	The ordinary currency. Earned every battle, spent on vehicles, equipment, ammunition and repairs. Cannot be bought directly with money, only obtained by converting gold.
Derp gun	A short-barrelled, low-velocity gun firing large high-explosive shells. Unreliable and occasionally spectacular.
Equipment	Permanent items fitted to a vehicle — optics, rammers, stabilisers — bought with credits, as opposed to consumables, which are used up.
Farming credits	Deliberately playing a profitable mid-tier vehicle to fund an unprofitable top-tier one. A normal part of the economy, not a workaround.
Gold	The premium currency, bought with real money. Converts to credits and pays for convenience items.
Grind	The process of accumulating enough experience and credits to unlock and buy the next vehicle.
Hull-down	Positioned behind a ridge so only your turret is exposed. Extremely strong on vehicles with a well-armoured turret.
Matchmaker	The system that builds the two teams from whoever is queueing, balancing by tier and class.
Module damage	Damage to a specific component — engine, tracks, ammunition rack, gun, optics — or to a crew member, rather than to the health pool. Repaired with consumables.
Normalisation	A small correction the game applies on impact, nudging a shell towards the perpendicular and slightly improving its chances against an angled plate.
Overmatch	When a shell’s calibre is large enough relative to a plate’s thickness that the angle rules stop protecting it. Why an oversized gun sometimes goes straight through a thin sloped surface.
Penetration	How much effective armour a shell can defeat. Compared against the effective thickness at the point and angle of impact, not the number printed on the plate.
Platoon	A small pre-made group that queues together. Up to three players on PC.
Premium account	A paid subscription that multiplies the credits and experience each battle pays out. It changes earnings, not vehicle performance.
Premium ammunition	Higher-penetration shells that cost several times as much. Buyable with ordinary credits, which is why the pay-to-win argument about them is unresolved.
Premium tank	A vehicle bought rather than researched. Generally earns more credits and is balanced as a separate pool from the tech tree.
Ricochet	A shell arriving at too steep an angle skids off entirely, doing nothing at all.
Sidescraping	Sitting behind a corner at a sharp angle so that only heavily angled side armour is exposed, with the tracks absorbing anything that does connect.
Sixth Sense	The crew perk that warns you when you have been spotted. Widely regarded as the single most useful perk in the game.
Spaced armour	A thin outer plate standing off from the hull, which can set off some shell types before they reach the real armour.
Spotting damage	Damage dealt by your teammates to vehicles that only you can see. Tracked and rewarded; the main way a light tank earns.
Stock	A vehicle in its starting configuration, with its worst gun, engine and tracks. Not representative of the vehicle.
Tech tree	The branching research chart for each nation, running from tier I to tier X.
Tier	A vehicle’s rank from I to X. Roughly tracks capability and, importantly, running cost.
Track	Used as a verb: to deliberately shoot a vehicle’s tracks to immobilise it. Also the defensive habit of presenting a track so it absorbs an incoming shell.
View range	How far your vehicle can spot, from the vehicle itself, its optics and its crew — up to a fixed maximum distance beyond which vision cannot reach at all.
XP	Experience. Unlocks modules and vehicles. Does not buy them; that is what credits are for.

Missing something? Tell us at info@miranov.online and we will add it.

For the mechanics behind most of these terms, see the main article; for what to do with them, the beginner’s guide.

Compiled by Lisa Anderson, 22 September 2026. Terminology checked against the publisher’s official wiki and patch notes. Where this page differs from the publisher’s own current information, the publisher’s information prevails.