The following is a glossary of traditional English-language terms used in the three overarching cue sports disciplines: carom billiards referring to the various games played on a billiard table without ; pool, which denotes a host of games played on a table with six pockets; and snooker, played on a large pocket table, and which has a sport culture unto itself distinct from pool. There are also hybrid pocket/carom games such as English billiards.
The term "" is sometimes used to refer to all of the cue sports, to a specific class of them, or to specific ones such as English billiards; this article uses the term in its most generic sense unless otherwise noted. The labels "British" and "UK" as applied to entries in this glossary refer to terms originating in the UK and also used in countries that were fairly recently part of the British Empire and/or are part of the Commonwealth of Nations, as opposed to US terminology. The terms "American" or "US" as applied here refer generally to North Americanusage. However, due to the predominance of US-originating terminology in most internationally competitive pool, US terms are also common in the pool context in other countries in which English is at least a minority language, and US terms predominate in carom billiards. Similarly, British terms predominate in the world of snooker, English billiards and blackball, regardless of the players' nationalities. The term "blackball" is used in this glossary to refer to both blackball and eight-ball pool as played in the Commonwealth, as a shorthand. Blackball was chosen because it is less ambiguous, and blackball is globally standardized by an International Olympic Committee-recognized governing body, the World Pool-Billiard Association ; meanwhile, its ancestor, eight-ball pool, is largely a folk game, like North American, and to the extent that its rules have been codified, they have been done so by competing authorities with different rulesets. Foreign-language terms are generally not within the scope of this list, unless they have become an integral part of billiards terminology in English, or they are crucial to meaningful discussion of a game not widely known in the English-speaking world.
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In Russian pyramid, the cue ball is usually red, but any ball can be used as a cue ball, with the exception of dynamic pyramid variant.
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In English billiards, running a coup is when a player, from, directly pockets the cue-ball when no ball are out of. If the ball first makes contact with the flat of a cushion and then enters a pocket, this is not regarded as running a coup.
