Most kink glossaries are alphabetical, which is useless if you do not already know the word you are looking for. This one is grouped by what each thing is actually about, because the useful discovery for most people is not a definition — it is realising that the forty words they have seen thrown around describe about six underlying ideas.
How to use this list
Three things worth saying before the list itself.
These are words, not identities. Recognising yourself in one of them does not commit you to anything, does not require you to adopt the label, and does not mean you have to be interested in whatever else the word tends to travel with. A great many people find the vocabulary first and spend years assuming the noun is a bigger claim than it is.
Almost everything here is a spectrum. For most terms there is a version that is a mild preference and a version that organises somebody’s whole sexual life, and the same word covers both. Where you sit matters far more than which word applies.
All of it assumes consent. Every entry below describes something negotiated in advance between adults who can stop it at any point. That is not a disclaimer bolted onto the end — for several of these terms it is the entire difference between a kink and a criminal offence, and the individual posts say so where it applies.
One more thing that saves people a great deal of confusion: several of these words describe different axes and get used as though they were the same. What you are drawn to feeling, who you want deciding, and what persona you want to inhabit are three independent questions. A person can want to be in charge and want to receive intensity; a person can want to give up every decision and want nothing painful anywhere near them. Most mismatched evenings come from a couple agreeing on the word and disagreeing about which axis they meant.
Power and control
The largest family, and the one most people mean when they say “kink”. What these share is that somebody has agreed to hand a decision to somebody else — not strength, not aggression, just a decision.
Dominance and submission is the general case: one person holds authority within agreed limits, the other gives it up. It can run for an evening or as a standing arrangement.
Chastity narrows that to a single decision — when somebody is allowed to come, and who decides. It usually involves more sexual contact than before rather than less.
Praise is arousal from being told, in the moment, that you are doing well. It is the least exotic thing on this list and probably the most widely held.
Degradation and humiliation sit at the opposite pole: agreed, contained use of words that would wound in any other context. The person receiving them picks the vocabulary in advance, which is the rule that makes it work.
Sensation
This family is about what is felt rather than who is deciding. The two overlap constantly and they are genuinely separate axes — you can have an elaborate authority structure with nothing painful in it, and a great deal of intensity between two equals.
Masochism is arousal from receiving intensity; sadism, in the kink sense, is arousal from giving it to someone who asked. They are not a matching pair and frequently do not line up.
Sadomasochism is the umbrella for the two together, and what makes it interesting is the feedback loop between the people rather than either appetite alone.
Impact play is the practical form most people arrive through — anything involving deliberate striking, from a hand upward. Where it is safe to strike is a much shorter list than people assume.
Sensory play is the gentlest entry point on this whole page: controlling what somebody can see, hear and feel, usually with a blindfold and something cold. It needs no equipment and works on almost everybody.
Primal play strips out the ritual entirely — chasing, pinning, instinct rather than script. It requires the most explicit negotiation of anything here, because it contains resistance by design.
If you are starting from nothing, sensory play is the entry point we would suggest over any of the others. It costs nothing, needs no vocabulary, works in ten minutes on a sofa, and it teaches the two skills everything else on this page depends on: going slower than feels natural, and paying close attention to somebody else’s response.
Watching and being watched
Three words for the same axis, seen from different positions. All three are legal and ordinary between consenting people, and all three become criminal offences the moment somebody who has not agreed is involved — which is why the individual posts front-load that rather than mentioning it at the end.
Voyeurism is arousal from watching. Within a couple it usually looks quite domestic: watching a partner undress and deliberately not helping.
Exhibitionism is the same axis reversed — arousal from being seen, by someone whose reaction you can register. For most people it is satisfied entirely inside a closed room.
Cuckolding extends it to a third person: one partner has sex with someone else, with the other’s knowledge, and the knowing is the point. The third person is a participant with their own consent to give, which is the part most writing on it ignores.
Persona and transformation
What these share is becoming somebody, or something, other than your ordinary self for a while. The appeal is usually the permission that comes with it rather than the costume.
Roleplay is the general case, and the scenarios that fail almost always fail in the first thirty seconds rather than for lack of imagination.
Pet play is a headspace rather than a costume — playful, non-verbal, and involving no animals whatsoever. The persona is a mechanism for setting down the competent adult for an hour.
Latex is arousal attached to a material. Most of the appeal described by people who wear it is tactile rather than visual, which is the opposite of how it is usually photographed.
Foot fetish is the most common body-part fetish and the most mocked, which is an uncomfortable combination for the people who have it.
A note on how these travel together, since almost nobody is interested in exactly one thing. Roleplay is the most common carrier — it supplies a pretext, and a pretext makes almost everything else easier to start. Restraint and sensation pair naturally because being unable to move and being unable to see do the same job. And power exchange runs underneath all of it or none of it, depending entirely on the couple. There is no correct combination and no progression you are supposed to follow.
Restraint
Being held still, by rope or otherwise. It overlaps with power exchange constantly and is not the same thing — plenty of people enjoy rope purely as sensation and would be irritated by an evening that assumed submission came with it.
Shibari is the Japanese rope tradition and the aesthetic form most people have seen.
Rope bunny is the term for the person being tied — an active role rather than a passive one, and the one person in the room who can feel what is actually happening.
Rope is also the place on this list where competence matters most. Nerve injuries happen quickly and without much warning, which is why both posts spend more time on what to stop for than on what to tie.
Two practical points about rope specifically, since it is the entry on this page where enthusiasm most outruns competence. It needs a second person who has actually learned something rather than watched something, and it needs safety shears within arm’s reach before the first wrap rather than in a drawer. Neither is a formality: rope is the only item on this list where a mistake made in a few seconds can take months to resolve.
It is also, for what it is worth, the item people most often discover they enjoy for reasons entirely unlike what they expected. A great many arrive for the look of it and stay for the pressure — a broad, even, containing sensation across a large area of the body that most people have no other way to experience, and which is closer to being held than to anything restrictive.
States rather than activities
One entry, because it is not something you do — it is something that sometimes happens while you are doing something else.
Subspace is the floating, distant, hard-to-speak state some people reach during intense play. It is widely treated as the goal and it should not be: it is a side effect, most sessions do not produce it, and consent given inside it is not reliable.
It is on this list mainly so that people who have experienced it have a word for it, and so that people who never do stop assuming they are missing something.
A related word people look for and rarely find explained: a switch is somebody who moves between roles rather than staying on one side. It is extremely common, it is not indecision, and it is not a lesser version of either position — plenty of people find that which side they want depends on the week, the partner, or nothing they can identify.
Two more terms belong here rather than in a family of their own, because they describe positions rather than interests. A top is whoever is doing in a given session and a bottom is whoever is receiving — which sounds identical to dominant and submissive and is not. A bottom can be entirely in charge of what happens to them, negotiating as an equal throughout, and plenty are. The words describe the direction of the activity, not the direction of the authority.
Getting that distinction straight resolves more confused conversations than any other single thing on this page, because a couple can agree enthusiastically that one of them will be the bottom and discover mid-evening that only one of them thought that meant giving up decisions.
What is deliberately not on this list
Some things get filed under “kink” that do not belong there, and saying so is more useful than quietly leaving them out.
Anything involving somebody who has not agreed is not a kink, whatever it is called. That covers exposure to strangers, watching people who did not consent to being watched, and anything done to somebody who was not in a position to agree at the time. The presence of a word for it does not make it a preference.
Anything involving minors is not on this list and never will be, including the vocabulary that circles it. Nor is anything involving animals — which is worth saying explicitly on a page that includes pet play, since the two get confused by people who have only read the name.
And some things are simply out of scope here rather than objectionable: chemical approaches to any of this are a matter for a doctor, not a blog, and nothing on this site gives medical advice.
Finally, a word about the things that get called kinks and are really just preferences. A great deal of ordinary sexual taste — a position, a setting, a particular kind of attention — ends up filed under this heading by people who then worry about what it says about them. If it is negotiated, enjoyed and hurts nobody, the category it belongs to is not a question that needs answering.
Where to start if none of this named it
Plenty of people read a list like this and recognise nothing, which is common and does not mean the answer is missing. Vocabulary is a poor way in — it asks you to match yourself to a category before you have language for what you actually want.
The alternative is to work from what you respond to rather than from what things are called. The Kink Compass takes about four minutes, asks sixteen questions about how you behave rather than what you are into, and gives you a type and — more usefully — words for the thing you have not been able to phrase. Nothing is stored and no email is needed to see the result.
If you would rather start from the practical end, the beginners’ guide covers the framework that everything on this page sits inside: negotiation, safewords, and what to do afterwards.