Mahjong Terminology: A Bilingual Glossary

Call actions

Chi (吃): take a discard to complete a sequence. Pon (碰): take a discard for a triplet. Kan (杠): declare four of a kind, which draws a replacement tile. These calls open your hand and usually lower your score ceiling.

Winning and waiting

Tsumo (自摸): win on your own draw. Ron (荣和/ロン): win on a discard. Tenpai (听牌): one tile away from winning. Riichi (立直): declaring ready on a closed hand for the chance at extra points.

Defense terms

Furiten (振听): you discarded a winning tile, so you cannot ron. Genbutsu: a tile your opponent already discarded — completely safe. Suuji (筋): tiles one rank away from discards, safer than average. This site shows furiten and tenpai status in the sidebar.

Tiles and hand structure

Suits: characters (man 万), bamboo (sou 索) and dots (pin 筒), each 1-9, plus honors (wind and dragon tiles). Terminals are the 1s and 9s; simples are 2-8. A meld is a triplet (pon) or sequence (chi); a pair is the two-tile head, and four melds plus a pair (14 tiles) is the winning hand.

Dora (宝牌) are extra-value tiles shown by an indicator; akadora are the red fives. In American Mahjong the equivalent special tiles are jokers and flowers.

Flow and scoring terms

The wall is the deck of remaining tiles; the dead wall holds the dora indicators and replacement draws. East is the dealer — in riichi the dealer repeats after a win. Riichi sticks and honba (場棒) carry over between rounds and raise the score of the next win.

Mangan is the scoring cap at five fan; below it, fan and fu combine into the base points. Yakuman are the maximum hands worth many mangan.