Romance Abbreviations and Terms
Romance Readers: A Guide to Abbreviations and Terms
A guide for those who read or will start reading romance books
Published in
2 min readApr 10, 2023
You don’t need to read many reviews of romance books before realizing they sometimes speak a different language.
Backlist, DNF, MMC, YA — What?
Therefore, I have created this guide with abbreviations and terminology for Readers of Romance. This is not a complete list since there are too many for me to cover in one story. Some of the terms are not specific to only romantic literature.
Romance Abbreviations and Terms
- Alpha Male / Hero— When the hero behaves as dominant, overprotective, leader, jealous, commanding, and knows what he wants. Often great heroes in romance novels.
- Autobuy — An author you like so much that you automatically buy their books.
- Backlist — An author’s previous books.
- Dark — books with darker themes, mature and taboo content. These books often have a content warning.
- DNF — Did Not Finish (the book)
- DNR — Do Not Read
- F2L/FTL — Friends to lovers
