Crochet abbreviations

Read this first: the list is written in US terms

Craft Yarn Council state plainly that their definitions reflect U.S. crochet terminology. That matters more in crochet than in almost any other craft, because the same abbreviations exist in UK patterns and several of them mean different stitches. Before you look anything up, settle which system you are in.

Chain and slip stitch are the only two that do not move. Everything else shifts one rung, which is why dc is genuinely ambiguous on its own — see US vs UK crochet terms for how to tell which system a pattern is written in.

Stitches

The abbreviations that name a stitch. Where this editor draws the stitch, its chart symbol is shown beside it — click through for what the symbol means and how it is used.

Decreases, clusters and texture

Several stitches that share a top, a foot, or both. The chart symbol for these is the thing that tells you which — a shared top is stitches worked together, a shared foot is stitches worked into one place.

Where the hook goes: posts and loops

These do not change which stitch you make — they change where you insert the hook. On a chart they appear as a mark at the base of an otherwise ordinary symbol.

Instructions and positions

The words that tell you what to do with the stitches, rather than which stitch to make.

General pattern shorthand

Not specific to crochet, and the part most people can read without a key — but here for completeness.

Tunisian crochet

Craft Yarn Council keep a separate list for Tunisian crochet. It is worked on a long hook with all the loops held at once, so its stitches have their own names and are not part of the standard symbol set.

The punctuation

Not abbreviations, but the part of a written pattern that most often goes wrong. Craft Yarn Council list these separately:

Nested repeats inside asterisks are where written patterns get genuinely hard to follow, and they are the thing a chart replaces outright: on a diagram a repeat is simply the shape you can see happening again.

Abbreviations a list cannot cover

Designers invent abbreviations, and they are allowed to. Craft Yarn Council note that special abbreviations are normally defined at the front of a book or pattern, and that is where the authority sits. Picot is the everyday example: it is not on the master list at all, most patterns mean three chains by it, and some mean four or five.

So the practical order is: the pattern's own key first, this list second. If they disagree, the pattern wins — it is describing the thing you are actually making.

Why designers put the symbol next to the word

An abbreviation is a label for a stitch. A chart symbol is a picture of it, drawn where the stitch goes, at the height the stitch is. That is why a pattern published with both is easier to follow than either alone, and why a chart travels across languages that a word list cannot.

Every symbol in the tables above is rendered by the same code the chart editor draws with, so what you see here is exactly what would land in an exported chart.