The compleat WoW abbreviations

I've had this post on my mind for a while. What really inspired me to put it together was an email from reader Wamphyri as follows:

Although I've been playing WoW for a little while now, there's still a few things that puzzle me within the game. My main problem is the abbreviations everyone uses in chat. I was recently in IF (yeah, I know that one now!) and someone in trade chat wanted to buy (wtb) an enchant for DPS. The guy asking was a level 50-something mage, so I thought I'd send him a whisper (apologising for my noob-ness, of course) to ask what DPS meant. He replied quite quickly and told me it meant Damage Per Second. He found it quite amusing that I didn't know, saying that he has the same trouble himself regarding this issue.

This reader is certainly not the only person I've run into who has trouble with WoW's lingo, so I thought it might be helpful to write up a list of all the common abbreviations I could find. I did stumble a little bit in the Shaman section, since I'm just not that familiar with Shaman, so if y'all could help me out in the comments, with Shammy or any other abbreviations you think I should add, that would be wonderful. I'd like to keep this updated and make it as comprehensive as possible. Since the list is so big, I've split it up into several sections. I also made alphabetical lists in case you want to look something up.

• Chat, forums, zones, instances, raids, and miscellaneous are after the cut

• Class-specific

• Alphabetical, A-M

• Alphabetical, M-Z

• Chat:

• Forums:

• Miscellaneous:

• Zones:

• Instances (5-man):

• Instances (Raid):

For class-specific abbreviations, click on.