SENDO
To send a climb is to do it cleanly. From the start holds to the finish, no falls, no sitting on the rope, no stepping off to shake out. “I sent it” means the whole thing went in one go, and it is the single most-used word in a climbing gym.
The word is a clipping of send it, the same phrase snowboarders and mountain bikers use for committing to something fully, and climbers kept it because it conjugates: sent, sending, sender, and the unsent project you have been failing on for a month.
Send, flash, onsight, redpoint
These four cover almost everything you will hear, and the difference between them is only ever how much you knew and how many tries it took:
- Send. Clean, top to bottom. Says nothing about how many attempts came first.
- Flash. Sent first attempt, with beta: you watched someone, or somebody told you where the left hand goes.
- Onsight. Sent first attempt with no information at all. Mostly used on routes rather than boulders, where the equivalent is a first-go ascent.
- Redpoint. Sent after working the moves across attempts or sessions. This is what happens to a project when it finally goes.
Everything else is an attempt, sometimes a burn or a go. Attempts are not failures in any useful sense; they are the data.
How climbers actually use it
In the gym you will hear the noun and the verb used interchangeably, plus a few forms that confuse newcomers:
- “Did you send?” Did you do it cleanly, in the end.
- “Send it!” Shouted encouragement, usually as you leave the ground.
- “Sick send.” Approval, generally sincere.
- “Send train.” A queue of people all climbing the same problem and collectively working out the beta.
Nobody will mind if you say you “finished” a problem instead. The vocabulary is a shorthand among people who spend a lot of time in one building, not a test.
Sending and grades
A send is per-climb, and a grade is what makes a run of sends mean something: your first V4 send is a milestone, your twentieth is a warm-up. That is also why the same grade feels different in two gyms, and why keeping one record across both is the only way to see the trend rather than the setter’s mood.
FAQ
What does “send” mean in climbing?
To send a climb is to complete it cleanly from the start holds to the finish, without falling and without resting on the rope or stepping off. A send is the successful version of an attempt: same climb, but this time you did not come off.
What is the difference between a send and a flash?
A flash is a send on the first attempt, with beta (you had watched someone else or been told the moves). A send with no falls and no prior information at all is an onsight on a route, or a first-go ascent on a boulder. Every flash is a send; most sends are not flashes.
Where does the word “send” come from?
It is a clipping of “send it”, which climbers borrowed from the wider action-sports vocabulary for committing fully to something. The verb stuck because climbing needed a word for “did it cleanly” that was shorter than the alternatives, and it now conjugates freely: sent, sending, sender, unsent project.
Does topping out count as a send?
Only if the climb was clean. Reaching the top after falling twice is still an attempt in the logbook, and most climbers would say they “got the top” rather than that they sent it. The distinction only matters because it is what makes a logbook worth keeping.
What is a project?
A climb you cannot send yet and are working on across sessions. When it goes, that is a redpoint: a send after rehearsing the moves. Projects are where most of the improvement happens, which is why logging attempts matters as much as logging sends.
For the rest of the vocabulary the gym assumes you know, the beginner glossary runs through holds, moves and etiquette in the same plain language. And once you are sending things worth remembering, SENDO logs them in one tap, free on iOS and Android, so next spring you can see what this month actually looked like.