League of Legends Esports Glossary

Docs

The terms you need to read broadcasts and match records, grouped by topic

League of Legends esports describes the same situation in different words depending on whether you are listening to commentary or reading a scoreboard. This page collects the terms that come up most often on LeagueLab and in match broadcasts, grouped into five themes: positions, objectives, macro play, tournament formats and stat abbreviations.

Positions

Five players each take a different role. Resource allocation and responsibilities differ by role, which is why stats should only ever be compared within the same position.

Top (TOP): The solo lane at the top of the map. It is far from the other lanes and easy to isolate, but the role also joins fights by teleport and creates pressure from the opposite side of the map.
Jungle (JUNGLE): Grows by clearing neutral monsters between the lanes and creates numbers advantages by intervening in them. As the centre of objective control, the jungler sets the pace of a team's macro play.
Mid (MID): The lane through the centre of the map. Short travel distance to either side makes roaming most efficient from here, and the role often carries the team's primary damage.
Bot / ADC: The ranged carry who shares the bottom lane with a support. As the role that deals sustained damage, it gets priority on team gold and supplies most of the firepower in late-game fights.
Support (SUPPORT): Shares the bottom lane with the ADC and handles vision control, peeling and engaging. Supports take almost no CS, so they must never be judged on CS or gold metrics.

Objectives and Structures

The neutral targets and structures on the map. Which team takes what first shapes the flow of the game more than almost anything else.

Dragon: A neutral monster that respawns periodically at the bottom river. Killing it grants the whole team a permanent buff, and stacking a set number first unlocks a far stronger effect.
Baron Nashor (Baron): The top-tier neutral monster that appears at the top river from mid-game onward. Killing it empowers the team and its nearby minions, making sieges far easier. A single Baron fight often decides the match.
Rift Herald (Herald): A neutral monster at the top river in the early and mid game. Once summoned, it charges into a turret and deals heavy damage — used to take early towers and lock in lane priority.
Voidgrubs: Neutral monsters that spawn as a group at the top river early in the game. Killing them grants bonus damage against structures, which converts into early tower pressure.
Turret Plates: Plating attached to turrets in the early game. Each plate taken pays out gold, making it the most direct way to convert a lane advantage into resources.
Inhibitor: A structure guarding the approach to the base. When it falls, super minions spawn in that lane and apply constant pressure to the enemy base. It respawns after a set time.

Macro Play

The phrases commentators reach for when describing a situation. Most of them are different angles on the same question: who created a numbers advantage, and where.

Snowball: The way a small advantage compounds into a larger one. Gold from a kill becomes an item, and that item wins the next fight — the chain reaction is what the term names.
Dive: Attacking into turret range to take down an opponent. It accepts turret damage in exchange for a kill and lane priority when it works.
Backdoor: Slipping into an empty lane to take down structures while avoiding fights, timed for the moment the enemy's vision is committed elsewhere.
Roam: Leaving your own lane briefly to join a fight elsewhere on the map. Mid laners and supports do it most, since their travel distances are shortest.
Jungle Pathing: The order in which a jungler clears camps and moves. Pathing determines which lane they can reach first, which makes it closer to a blueprint for the early game.
Split Push: Keeping pressure in a separate lane with one player to split the enemy's attention. If they send someone to answer, the other four take profit elsewhere.
Vision Control: Placing wards and clearing the enemy's to tilt map information one way. Objective fights are usually decided in the vision battle before they begin.

Tournament Formats

Reading a schedule or a standings table means knowing how the competition is structured.

Bo1 / Bo3 / Bo5: Notation for how many games make up a series. Bo3 goes to the first team with 2 wins, Bo5 to the first with 3. The longer the series, the more draft strategy matters.
Group Stage: Teams are split into groups, play within them, and the top finishers advance. How the groups are drawn can create real differences in difficulty.
Swiss Stage: Teams are matched against others with the same record. It reduces the luck of the draw: reach the required number of wins and you advance, reach the required losses and you are out.
Playoffs: The knockout stage that decides the title once the regular schedule ends. Usually played as series, with a loss meaning elimination or a drop into the lower bracket.
Seed: Bracket priority awarded on regular-season results. A higher seed can mean starting in a later round or facing a more favourable opponent.

Stat Abbreviations

The abbreviations that appear on scoreboards and leaderboards. How each is calculated, and how to avoid misreading it, is covered in the metrics guide.

KDA: (Kills + assists) ÷ deaths. It compresses fight contribution into one number, but it also rises by simply staying safe at the back, so read it alongside damage stats.
CS: Creep score — minions and jungle monsters killed. The basic measure of lane growth, usually compared as CSPM so that game length drops out.
DPM: Damage per minute to enemy champions only, excluding minions and structures. The standard stat for comparing a carry's output.
DPG (damage per gold): Damage dealt to champions divided by gold earned — how efficiently a player turned resources into damage. Across several games it is the sum of damage over the sum of gold, not the average of per-game values, and only games where both numbers were recorded are counted.
GPM: Gold earned per minute. Total gold grows with game length, so per-minute is the figure to use when comparing income efficiency.
Lane gold difference (GD): Gold difference against your lane opponent. LeagueLab reads its lane-phase stats at a marker: whichever comes first, the fall of the first tower or the 15-minute mark. Positive means you were ahead in lane. It is read at a different moment than GD@15 below, so the two values can differ.
GD@15 · CSD@15 · XPD@15 (fixed 15-minute gaps): Gold, CS and experience differences against the lane opponent, read at a fixed 15-minute mark no matter how the game unfolded. The champion table and the champion report use this axis. Because every game is measured at the same moment — unlike the first-tower marker above — champions compare cleanly against one another.
GD@9 · CSD@9 (team gap at 9 min): Used by the team metrics page and the team axes on League at a Glance. It is the per-game gold and CS gap measured at the 9-minute mark and averaged over the team's games. Unlike the player laning metrics, which key off the first tower, this reads the whole team's early advantage.
Kill Participation (KP): The share of the team's kills a player contributed to with a kill or an assist. It shows how often they were present for the team's fights.
Pick rate / Ban rate: The share of games in the selected scope in which a champion was picked, and the share in which it was banned. Read together, they show how seriously teams treated the champion.
Vision Score: A combined score for time your wards kept the map lit and your contribution to clearing enemy wards. Supports dominate it, so compare only within the same position.
VSPM (vision score per minute): Vision score divided by game length in minutes. The raw total grows with longer games, so it is normalised per minute for comparison. Supports score far higher than anyone else, so only compare within the same position.
Grinding signal: Champions that pros keep playing in solo queue while they have (almost) never appeared in official matches. It compares the last 14 days of pro solo queue games with pick counts in the same competitive scope (league and stage), and appears only when solo queue games clear a threshold while competitive picks stay under one. It is an observation that a champion may be in preparation, not a prediction that it will be picked next match.
Relative-scale radar: A single shape that folds a player, team, or champion onto a relative scale across several axes. On each axis the median of the peer group (players at the same position in the same event, or the teams in that event) sits at the centre, and everything else moves in or out from it in proportion to the actual gap in value; the dashed grey ring is that median. The lowest value is no longer pinned to 0, so a bottom-of-the-table shape never collapses into a sliver. Because it measures distance in value rather than rank, a dominant leader stretches the shape as far as the lead really is, and a tightly bunched field produces shapes that look alike. A bigger shape means a stronger standing against the peer group, and the direction it stretches is that player's or team's style fingerprint. Axes without collected data are dropped entirely rather than filled with 0, so the number of axes can differ between events.

How each metric is calculated and where it can mislead is explained in detail in the metrics guide. Go to Metrics Guide →