The words are easy. Knowing when to use them is the part nobody writes down.
There is a moment, usually about thirty seconds into your first repeater contact, when you realise the other operator is speaking English and you still have no idea what they said. They aren’t being clever. They’re using words that mean one thing in a shack and something else everywhere else in the world.
Half of it is borrowed from telegraphy, which is why so much of it is short. The other half grew out of people talking to each other on the air for a hundred years and shortening whatever they said most often.
The table below is the everyday vocabulary — what people actually say, what it means, and a line showing how it sounds in use. It isn’t a complete dictionary and it isn’t trying to be. It’s the set you’ll run into in your first month.
Read the third column more than the second. Knowing that “clear” means finished is easy. Knowing that you say it as “this is [your call] clear” is the part that makes you sound like you belong.
If what went past you was an abbreviation rather than a phrase — SWR, APRS, MUF — it lives in the acronyms and Q codes list instead. And if it’s a concept rather than a word, like what a band actually is or why SWR matters, that’s what the terminology guide is for.
The year 73 first turns up in a printed list of telegraph brevity codes. The telegraph is long gone. Hams still sign off with it, which makes it just about the oldest thing anybody says on the air.