The first night at a mahjong table is mostly vocabulary. People say soap and jokerless and courtesy and you nod along and hope it becomes clear. Here is the whole vocabulary in one place, in the order you are likely to hear it.
The tiles
Craks, bams, and dots are the three suits, each numbered one through nine. Craks show a Chinese character, bams show bamboo sticks (the one bam is usually a bird), dots show circles. Winds are north, east, west, and south. Dragons come in three colors, red, green, and white, each tied to a suit. Flowers are the decorative tiles, eight of them in a standard American set.
Soap is the white dragon, so called because the blank or framed tile looks like a bar of soap. It doubles as a zero in card lines that call for one. Joker is the wild tile, eight in an American set, and the single most contested piece of plastic on the table.
The setup and the deal
The wall is the tiles built into rows at the start of a hand. East is the dealer position, which rotates. The rack is the stand holding your tiles, hiding them from opponents while you sort. A pusher is the sliding bar some racks have for pushing your wall forward.
Charleston is the ritual passing sequence at the start of every hand: three tiles right, three across, three left, then optionally back the other way, then a final courtesy pass. It exists to give everyone a fighting chance at a real hand, and it is where most hands are actually decided.
Passing terms
Blind pass means passing tiles you have not looked at, which is legal in the second and third passes of the first Charleston. Courtesy pass is the optional one to three tile swap with the player across from you at the end of the Charleston, and it must be agreed by both players. Stealing is passing along tiles you just received without adding your own, which is legal on the middle pass only.
During play
Pung is three of a kind. Kong is four. Quint is five, which only exists with jokers. Pair is two, and a pair can never contain a joker. Exposure is a called set laid face up on your rack. Calling is claiming a discard to complete a set.
Redeeming a joker means swapping the real tile for a joker sitting in someone's exposure, which you may do on your turn. Naming your discard means saying the tile out loud as you throw it, which is not optional etiquette, it is how the table hears a call in time.
How hands end
Mahjong is the call you make when your hand is complete, and it ends the hand immediately. Dead hand means your hand cannot legally win, usually because of an incorrect exposure, and you play on but cannot call mahjong. Wall game means the wall ran out with no winner, so nobody pays.
Jokerless means completing a hand without using any jokers, which many groups pay a bonus for. Self-picked means you drew your winning tile from the wall rather than calling it, another common bonus. House rules vary on both, so ask before the first hand rather than after.
Words for what your hand is doing
You will hear players talk about which direction a hand is going, or which category it belongs to: consecutive runs, like numbers, single suit, winds and dragons. These are not official card sections so much as the shapes players learn to recognize at a glance.
Getting fluent in that recognition is the real learning curve, and it is the thing a card cannot teach you, because the card shows destinations while your rack shows a starting point. Our free coach reads your actual tiles and names the direction they are going, with the reasoning spelled out, which is how the pattern eventually becomes yours.
Put it into practice
The fastest way to make any of this stick is to read a real hand. Mei, our AI coach, reads your exact tiles and explains every move, free, no account needed.