Vape Glossary: UK Vaping Terms Explained

Walk into a British vape shop, or open any forum thread, and you hit what sounds like a foreign language. MTL, sub ohm, shortfill, dry hit, drip tip: the words fly, half technical English, half enthusiast slang. None of it exists to keep people out. It exists because a practice this fiddly needs precise words. This vape glossary decodes the essential terms, and it does so by family of use rather than in a flat A to Z list, because that is how the vocabulary actually works.

What this vape glossary covers

Most glossaries on British retail sites run alphabetically, which puts airflow next to ADV and coil next to cotton with nothing linking them. Useful for a quick lookup, useless for understanding.

Here the words are grouped the way vapers use them: the kit you hold, the liquid you fill it with, the way you draw on it, the UK rules that shape both, and the slang the community invented for itself. Read straight through and the logic emerges. Almost every term points to an object, a setting or a sensation.

The kit: mods, tanks and coils

This is the first family anyone meets, the family of objects.

Mod: the part that houses the battery and the electronics. A box mod is the boxy, screened, adjustable version, and APV, for advanced personal vaporiser, is the older name for the same idea.
Tank: the reservoir that holds your e-liquid. A clearomiser is a clear tank with a replaceable coil inside, and yes, British shops spell it with an s, as they do atomiser.
Coil: the heating element, measured in ohms, that turns liquid into vapour. It wears out and gets replaced, which is why regulars talk about coils the way drivers talk about tyres.
Cotton: the wick that carries liquid to the coil. On rebuildable atomisers, you fit the cotton yourself.
Drip tip: the mouthpiece you inhale through, often swappable, and a small object of taste in its own right.
Pod: a compact format where the cartridge is the tank. Open pods refill, closed pods are replaced whole.
Mesh: a coil built from perforated metal sheet rather than wire, favoured for flavour.

The e-liquid vocabulary

Second family: what goes in the tank. These words describe composition and dosage.

E-liquid, sometimes called juice, is built on propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine, shortened everywhere to PG and VG. PG carries flavour and throat hit, VG carries vapour density, and the ratio between them, written 50/50 or 70/30, defines the character of a bottle.

Freebase nicotine is the traditional form. Nic salts are a different formulation that feels smoother at higher strengths, which is why they dominate pod refills. Steeping is the practice of letting a bottle rest so the flavour settles, and ADV, all day vape, is the flavour you never tire of.

Two more terms belong here. Priming means wetting a new coil before the first puff, and a dry hit is the harsh burnt taste you get when the cotton runs dry, a problem worth understanding properly if your vape tastes burnt.

Practice and draw styles

Third family, the liveliest one: how you actually vape.

MTL, mouth to lung, means drawing vapour into the mouth first, then inhaling, on a tight airflow. DTL, direct to lung, goes straight down in one motion on a wide open airflow. RDL, restricted direct to lung, sits between the two and has quietly become the most popular middle ground in the UK.

Sub ohm describes a coil below one ohm, which needs more power and produces more vapour. Wattage is the power the mod sends to the coil, ohm the unit of resistance, airflow the adjustable air intake that tightens or opens the draw, and wicking the speed at which cotton reabsorbs liquid between puffs.

These styles shape everything else you buy, which is why the difference between MTL and DTL deserves an article of its own rather than a glossary line.

The UK rulebook: TPD, shortfills and nic shots

This part of the vape glossary is genuinely local. American glossaries have no equivalent, because these words exist only because of British and European law.

TPD, the Tobacco Products Directive, is the rule set retained in UK law that caps tanks at 2 ml, nicotine-containing bottles at 10 ml, and strength at 20 mg/ml. Every legal product on a British shelf sits inside those numbers.

A shortfill is the trade’s answer to the 10 ml cap: a larger bottle, filled short and sold with no nicotine, leaving headroom on purpose. A nic shot is the small 10 ml nicotine bottle you tip in to fill that headroom, giving a finished strength of 3 mg or 6 mg depending on the maths. Nothing about this arrangement is accidental. It is a legal workaround that became a whole product category, and understanding it explains half the shelf.

Community slang

The last family rarely makes it into retailer glossaries, and it is the one that says most about the culture.

A cloud chaser is someone chasing the biggest possible plume, a discipline with its own competitions and its own gear, covered in our piece on cloud chasing. Chain vaping means puffing in quick succession, which is exactly how you outrun your wicking and earn a dry hit. Vaper’s tongue is the temporary flavour blindness that sets in after too long on one liquid. Tricks are the visual side of it all, the ghost inhale and the rings.

Pick these up and you cross an invisible line. Slang, more than kit, is what signals experience in a thread.

Why the vape glossary sounds like this

None of this vocabulary is arbitrary. Most acronyms come from English because modern vaping spread from English-speaking markets, so MTL, DTL and coil travelled worldwide unchanged.

The rest is British bureaucracy turned into shop talk. Shortfill and nic shot are not marketing inventions, they are what happens when a legal cap meets a practical need. That mix of imported slang and local regulation is why a British glossary reads differently from an American one, and why anyone choosing a first vape benefits from starting with the words before the kit.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to learn all of this to start?

No. A handful of kit and draw terms will do. The rest of the vocabulary arrives on its own through shopping, reading and conversation.

What is the difference between a mod and a box mod?

Both house the battery and electronics. Box mod specifically means the rectangular, screened, wattage-adjustable kind, while mod is the broader word.

Why is it spelled atomiser and not atomizer?

British retailers and forums use the s spelling, following standard UK orthography. Both refer to the same component, and you will see the z form on American sites.

What exactly is a shortfill?

A larger bottle of nicotine-free e-liquid, deliberately underfilled so a 10 ml nic shot can be added. It exists because UK rules cap nicotine-containing bottles at 10 ml.

Is vaping vocabulary the same everywhere?

The core acronyms are universal. The regulatory words are not: shortfill, nic shot and TPD are specific to Britain and Europe, and mean nothing on an American forum.

A vape glossary that never stops moving

A vape glossary is never finished. The words move with the hardware, with the rules and with whichever scene is loudest that year. Pod systems brought their own vocabulary in a couple of seasons, and the next format will do the same.

Learning the terms will not make anyone an expert overnight. What it does is open a door onto a culture where every word points at something concrete: a component, a setting, a sensation, a legal limit. Keep this vape glossary to hand, read a few threads, ask the awkward questions in a shop, and the language stops feeling like a wall.

Editorial content for adult readers only. Vaping products usually contain nicotine, a substance that causes addiction. Not for sale to under-18s in the United Kingdom. This article is not a buying recommendation.