A Guide to Understanding Cartridge Names
In order the understand the names given to firearms cartridges, one assumption must be made: they won't make much sense.
Cartridge naming conventions are a jumbled mess, pulling their measurements from a variety of standards including metric, SAE, and pre-Industrial Revolution measurement systems. Some cartridges are almost exact copies of one another but have entirely separate identities due to trademark issues. Even within measurement systems, some cartridges measure bullet diameter while others measure rifling diameter, and even once you narrow it down to the rifling diameter, sometimes the measure is from the surface of the rifling (lands) and sometimes the measure is from the bottom of the rifling (grooves). Finally, the whole mess is further complicated by regional naming preferences, which is perhaps the most confusing and least sensible element of all.
Still, some confusions are more common than others, so below you'll find a list of commonly used cartridge designations. Each term will explain the cartridge that is probably being referred to, as well as details on other cartridges that are often called by the same or similar names.
"fifty cal"
Many cartridges can be called "50 caliber" but by far the most common is the .50 BMG (Browning Machine Gun), sometimes called the 12.7x99mm NATO. If a man in a movie yells "get on that fifty!" he's talking about a gun using the .50 BMG. .50 BMG guns are usually found on tripods behind sandbags, or mounted onto vehicles, as the .50 BMG is a massive cartridge by small arms standards. There are a few specialized rifles that allow a single person to use the round, but these are unusual weapons oriented towards disabling vehicles and materiel and are not usually used for anti-personnel activities.
Other common cartridges that bear the "fifty cal" name are:
.50 AE (Action Express)
.50 AE is the second most famous .50 cal, as it is the the popular chambering of the famous Desert Eagle pistol. As handgun rounds go, there aren't too many that pack more of a punch than the .50 AE (though it is still diminutive in comparison to the above .50 BMG). The .50 AE is a round optimized for semi-automatic pistols and was designed for hunting big game and providing protection from large predators.
.500 S&W (Smith and Wesson)
The .500 S&W was designed as part of a multi-national pissing contest, where manufacturers from around the world competed to build the world's most powerful commercial handgun round. At the moment, the .500 S&W still holds that title, though some will debate the technicalities. By design, the .500 S&W is capable of killing anything born in North or South America with a single shot.
"forty five"
If someone says "I just bought a forty-five" the odds are good that they bought a pistol chambered for .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol). The .45 ACP is a big, slow-moving round that has been around since the early 1900s, and it hasn't skipped a beat in the past century. Sport shooters, law enforcement officers, and soldiers alike continue to chamber the .45 because of its accuracy and stopping power, and the round's low speed/high mass design makes it ideal for use in suppressed weapons.
Here are some other cartridges that might be called "forty-five":
.45 Colt, aka .45 Long Colt:
.45 Colt was originally a black powder cartridge that dates back to the legendary Colt Single Action Army revolver, popularly known as the "Peacemaker". When loaded hot with modern smokeless powder the .45 Long Colt is comparable to the .44 Magnum, but care must be taken to ensure that the chosen revolver is capable of tolerating these high pressures.
.45-70:
Often called the .45-70 Government, this cartridge was originally a black powder cartridge used by the U.S. Military and countless inhabitants of the Old West. Today, the .45-70 is appreciated for more than just its heritage, as it offers excellent performance and the massive, heavy bullet is accurate even when firing through dense underbrush. Finally, loading the .45-70 with smokeless powder and chambering it in a firearm of modern design and materials will provide a cartridge of extreme power, suitable for taking just about any game that walks the earth.
"nine millimeter"
9mm is especially confounding because it's the caliber just about everyone has heard of, regardless of their interest in firearms (or lack thereof). The "common" 9mm is called the 9mm Luger in the USA, though it is more properly called the 9mm Parabellum (9mm Para). The "Luger" name comes from the round's inventor Georg Luger, and from the famous Luger P08 pistol that he invented alongside the 9mm round. Despite being invented in the 1800s, the 9mm Luger is still the most popular handgun round in the world, as it provides a good balance of recoil and power and has physically small dimensions, allowing many rounds to fit in a single magazine.
There are a few other 9mm rounds that compete with the 9mm Luger, described below:
9mm Makarov:
9mm Makarov was Russia's answer to the 9mm Luger. The 9mm Makarov uses a slightly wider bullet than the 9mm Luger, so that captured stores of Russian ammunition could not be re-used in NATO weaponry. Despite this, the 9mm Makarov is a slightly less potent round than the 9mm Luger, a design feature dictated by the requirement that new pistol designed for the round (simply called the Makarov pistol) be a simple and inexpensive straight blowback design.
9mm IMI:
Not often seen in the USA, the 9mm IMI was designed for countries that have regulations against using military cartridges in civilian weaponry. In essence, the 9mm IMI is a 9mm Luger that has been altered "just enough" to keep the two rounds from being usable in the same weapons, while maintaining very similar performance.
"thirty eight"
A few decades ago, a "thirty-eight" was a .38 Special and that was that. Introduced at the tail end of the 1800s, the .38 Special stayed the standard duty round of countless law enforcement agencies until the end of the next century, and is still the most popular revolver cartridge in the world among sport shooters. However, the modern duty sidearm is semi-automatic, and the .38 Special doesn't adapt well to life in a box magazine. As the final nail in the coffin, several highly publicized shootouts gave rise to concerns over the round's effectiveness, with reports of multiple hits failing to incapacitate aggressive perpetrators confirmed in several instances.
Since the .38 Special has been dropped as a duty cartridge, the term "thirty-eight" has become a bit more foggy. See the descriptions below:
.380 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol):
This round is usually pronounced "three-eighty" or "three-eighty auto", and can be described as a smaller version of the 9mm Luger (in Europe, it's often called the 9mm Short), though the two cartridges were designed independently. Considered by many to be the "minimum" for an acceptable self-defense round, the .380 was introduced in the early 1900s and has remained popular, especially in small, concealable semi-automatic pistols.
.38 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol)
Designed by the same man and at around the same time as the above .380 Auto , the "thirty-eight auto" was a successful round but didn't have the staying power of the smaller .380 Auto, although it garnered some fame as the 8-shot chambering of the Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver. Today, the .38 Auto occupies an awkward middle between the 9mm Luger and the .380 Auto, with only a few commercial pistols still manufactured to chamber it.
"seven six two"
It's just about impossible to pick a "most likely to refer to" for this category because there are just so many popular cartridges, but since this author is speaking from the USA, regional preference dictates that a "seven-six-two" is most likely a 7.62x51mm NATO round. 7.62 NATO, as it is commonly called, is the proud workhorse of soldiers the world over. Developed as a compact and efficient replacement for the somewhat dated 30-06, 7.62 NATO is accurate, available, and powerful enough to take most game on earth with a single well-placed shot. 7.62 NATO is almost identical to .308 Winchester, the cartridge from which 7.62 NATO was derived, but there are enough dimensional and performance differences to advise caution and research before shooting 7.62 NATO in a .308 Winchester gun, or vice versa.
Other common cartridges that might be called seven-six-two are:
7.62x39mm, aka 7.62 Soviet:
Native caliber of the (in)famous AK-47, the 7.62 Soviet was actually developed for a machine gun called the RPD, and first saw notoriety in the AK-47's short-lived predecessor, the SKS. 7.62 Soviet is a more authoritative round that its Western competitor, 5.56 NATO, as a typical 7.62 Soviet cartridge fires a bullet that weighs twice as much and moves only 25% slower. However, 7.62 Soviet rounds generate substantially more recoil than 5.56 NATO rounds and are physically heavier, and both of those problems were compounded by the AK-47 rifle itself, which is rugged but neither light nor accurate. Russian troops were shooting less accurately and carrying fewer rounds than their enemies armed with 5.56 weapons, and for this reason, the Cold War saw the 7.62 Soviet's bullet diameter and weight reduced to create the less powerful but more sensible 5.45x39mm round, which serves Russia to this day.
7.62x54mmR, aka 7.62 Russian:
7.62 Russian is in the record books as the oldest cartridge still in active-duty military service, with Russian snipers and machine gunners still firing for effect more than 120 years after the the cartridge was first issued to Tsar Alexander III's troops in 1891. Russians aren't big fans of fixing what isn't broken, and there isn't much that is broken about 7.62 Russian. Power levels are somewhere between a 7.62 NATO and a 30-06, but hot-loading the cartridge can quickly put the power levels up to magnum territory. The cartridge is rimmed (as were most rounds developed in the 1800s) and so is prone to jamming in modern box magazines, but this does not hinder its effectiveness in the military, where it is only seen in single-stack sniper rifle magazines and machine gun ammunition belts.
7.62x25mm, aka 7.62 Tokarev:
7.62 Tokarev was developed for the TT series of pistols, which replaced the M1895 Nagant revolver in Russian military service during World War II. 7.62 Tokarev is a small, light, extremely high-velocity round with a characteristically loud, cracking report and a bright muzzle flash. Although 7.62 Tokarev is in the very exclusive club of pistol rounds that can pierce modern body armor, such armor wasn't even a consideration in the 1950s, which is when the 7.62 Tokarev was replaced by the more sensible 9mm Makarov. 7.62 Tokarev is starting to see a comeback as an inexpensive but effective alternative to high-tech, armor-piercing pistol rounds like the FN 5.7x28mm and HK 4.6x30mm.
7.62x39mmR, aka 7.62 Nagant:
A highly unusual cartridge, the 7.62 Nagant has the dubious distinction of being a cartridge that is only able to fired in a single type of gun, the M1895 Nagant revolver. Nagant revolvers are now widely available and extremely inexpensive, easily found for under $150 at the time of this writing. The gun is just about as weird as the cartridge, both having unique design features that create a gas-sealing system to increase the revolver's muzzle velocity and in the process making one of the only revolvers in history that can be suppressed (silenced).
*Note: Although both NATO and Russian cartridges are called "7.62", the exact diameters are not identical. NATO 7.62 rounds are .308" in diameter, while Russian 7.62 rounds are .312" in diameter. Firing .308" bullets in a Russian firearm will result in poor accuracy, as the bullet is not firmly gripped by the larger .312" rifling. Firing .312" bullets through a .308" barrel can generate excessive pressure and potentially cause catastrophic failure of the casing or action, but is often done (accidentally or ignorantly) without incident.
*Note: You may have noticed that most of these 7.62 caliber cartridges are Russian. If you believe the folklore, this was a cost-cutting measure of the first and second world wars, as Russian military factories only needed one set of tools to make barrels and ammunition for everything from pistols to machine guns.
Cartridge naming conventions are a jumbled mess, pulling their measurements from a variety of standards including metric, SAE, and pre-Industrial Revolution measurement systems. Some cartridges are almost exact copies of one another but have entirely separate identities due to trademark issues. Even within measurement systems, some cartridges measure bullet diameter while others measure rifling diameter, and even once you narrow it down to the rifling diameter, sometimes the measure is from the surface of the rifling (lands) and sometimes the measure is from the bottom of the rifling (grooves). Finally, the whole mess is further complicated by regional naming preferences, which is perhaps the most confusing and least sensible element of all.
Still, some confusions are more common than others, so below you'll find a list of commonly used cartridge designations. Each term will explain the cartridge that is probably being referred to, as well as details on other cartridges that are often called by the same or similar names.
"fifty cal"
Many cartridges can be called "50 caliber" but by far the most common is the .50 BMG (Browning Machine Gun), sometimes called the 12.7x99mm NATO. If a man in a movie yells "get on that fifty!" he's talking about a gun using the .50 BMG. .50 BMG guns are usually found on tripods behind sandbags, or mounted onto vehicles, as the .50 BMG is a massive cartridge by small arms standards. There are a few specialized rifles that allow a single person to use the round, but these are unusual weapons oriented towards disabling vehicles and materiel and are not usually used for anti-personnel activities.
Other common cartridges that bear the "fifty cal" name are:
.50 AE (Action Express)
.50 AE is the second most famous .50 cal, as it is the the popular chambering of the famous Desert Eagle pistol. As handgun rounds go, there aren't too many that pack more of a punch than the .50 AE (though it is still diminutive in comparison to the above .50 BMG). The .50 AE is a round optimized for semi-automatic pistols and was designed for hunting big game and providing protection from large predators.
.500 S&W (Smith and Wesson)
The .500 S&W was designed as part of a multi-national pissing contest, where manufacturers from around the world competed to build the world's most powerful commercial handgun round. At the moment, the .500 S&W still holds that title, though some will debate the technicalities. By design, the .500 S&W is capable of killing anything born in North or South America with a single shot.
"forty five"
If someone says "I just bought a forty-five" the odds are good that they bought a pistol chambered for .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol). The .45 ACP is a big, slow-moving round that has been around since the early 1900s, and it hasn't skipped a beat in the past century. Sport shooters, law enforcement officers, and soldiers alike continue to chamber the .45 because of its accuracy and stopping power, and the round's low speed/high mass design makes it ideal for use in suppressed weapons.
Here are some other cartridges that might be called "forty-five":
.45 Colt, aka .45 Long Colt:
.45 Colt was originally a black powder cartridge that dates back to the legendary Colt Single Action Army revolver, popularly known as the "Peacemaker". When loaded hot with modern smokeless powder the .45 Long Colt is comparable to the .44 Magnum, but care must be taken to ensure that the chosen revolver is capable of tolerating these high pressures.
.45-70:
Often called the .45-70 Government, this cartridge was originally a black powder cartridge used by the U.S. Military and countless inhabitants of the Old West. Today, the .45-70 is appreciated for more than just its heritage, as it offers excellent performance and the massive, heavy bullet is accurate even when firing through dense underbrush. Finally, loading the .45-70 with smokeless powder and chambering it in a firearm of modern design and materials will provide a cartridge of extreme power, suitable for taking just about any game that walks the earth.
"nine millimeter"
9mm is especially confounding because it's the caliber just about everyone has heard of, regardless of their interest in firearms (or lack thereof). The "common" 9mm is called the 9mm Luger in the USA, though it is more properly called the 9mm Parabellum (9mm Para). The "Luger" name comes from the round's inventor Georg Luger, and from the famous Luger P08 pistol that he invented alongside the 9mm round. Despite being invented in the 1800s, the 9mm Luger is still the most popular handgun round in the world, as it provides a good balance of recoil and power and has physically small dimensions, allowing many rounds to fit in a single magazine.
There are a few other 9mm rounds that compete with the 9mm Luger, described below:
9mm Makarov:
9mm Makarov was Russia's answer to the 9mm Luger. The 9mm Makarov uses a slightly wider bullet than the 9mm Luger, so that captured stores of Russian ammunition could not be re-used in NATO weaponry. Despite this, the 9mm Makarov is a slightly less potent round than the 9mm Luger, a design feature dictated by the requirement that new pistol designed for the round (simply called the Makarov pistol) be a simple and inexpensive straight blowback design.
9mm IMI:
Not often seen in the USA, the 9mm IMI was designed for countries that have regulations against using military cartridges in civilian weaponry. In essence, the 9mm IMI is a 9mm Luger that has been altered "just enough" to keep the two rounds from being usable in the same weapons, while maintaining very similar performance.
"thirty eight"
A few decades ago, a "thirty-eight" was a .38 Special and that was that. Introduced at the tail end of the 1800s, the .38 Special stayed the standard duty round of countless law enforcement agencies until the end of the next century, and is still the most popular revolver cartridge in the world among sport shooters. However, the modern duty sidearm is semi-automatic, and the .38 Special doesn't adapt well to life in a box magazine. As the final nail in the coffin, several highly publicized shootouts gave rise to concerns over the round's effectiveness, with reports of multiple hits failing to incapacitate aggressive perpetrators confirmed in several instances.
Since the .38 Special has been dropped as a duty cartridge, the term "thirty-eight" has become a bit more foggy. See the descriptions below:
.380 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol):
This round is usually pronounced "three-eighty" or "three-eighty auto", and can be described as a smaller version of the 9mm Luger (in Europe, it's often called the 9mm Short), though the two cartridges were designed independently. Considered by many to be the "minimum" for an acceptable self-defense round, the .380 was introduced in the early 1900s and has remained popular, especially in small, concealable semi-automatic pistols.
.38 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol)
Designed by the same man and at around the same time as the above .380 Auto , the "thirty-eight auto" was a successful round but didn't have the staying power of the smaller .380 Auto, although it garnered some fame as the 8-shot chambering of the Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver. Today, the .38 Auto occupies an awkward middle between the 9mm Luger and the .380 Auto, with only a few commercial pistols still manufactured to chamber it.
"seven six two"
It's just about impossible to pick a "most likely to refer to" for this category because there are just so many popular cartridges, but since this author is speaking from the USA, regional preference dictates that a "seven-six-two" is most likely a 7.62x51mm NATO round. 7.62 NATO, as it is commonly called, is the proud workhorse of soldiers the world over. Developed as a compact and efficient replacement for the somewhat dated 30-06, 7.62 NATO is accurate, available, and powerful enough to take most game on earth with a single well-placed shot. 7.62 NATO is almost identical to .308 Winchester, the cartridge from which 7.62 NATO was derived, but there are enough dimensional and performance differences to advise caution and research before shooting 7.62 NATO in a .308 Winchester gun, or vice versa.
Other common cartridges that might be called seven-six-two are:
7.62x39mm, aka 7.62 Soviet:
Native caliber of the (in)famous AK-47, the 7.62 Soviet was actually developed for a machine gun called the RPD, and first saw notoriety in the AK-47's short-lived predecessor, the SKS. 7.62 Soviet is a more authoritative round that its Western competitor, 5.56 NATO, as a typical 7.62 Soviet cartridge fires a bullet that weighs twice as much and moves only 25% slower. However, 7.62 Soviet rounds generate substantially more recoil than 5.56 NATO rounds and are physically heavier, and both of those problems were compounded by the AK-47 rifle itself, which is rugged but neither light nor accurate. Russian troops were shooting less accurately and carrying fewer rounds than their enemies armed with 5.56 weapons, and for this reason, the Cold War saw the 7.62 Soviet's bullet diameter and weight reduced to create the less powerful but more sensible 5.45x39mm round, which serves Russia to this day.
7.62x54mmR, aka 7.62 Russian:
7.62 Russian is in the record books as the oldest cartridge still in active-duty military service, with Russian snipers and machine gunners still firing for effect more than 120 years after the the cartridge was first issued to Tsar Alexander III's troops in 1891. Russians aren't big fans of fixing what isn't broken, and there isn't much that is broken about 7.62 Russian. Power levels are somewhere between a 7.62 NATO and a 30-06, but hot-loading the cartridge can quickly put the power levels up to magnum territory. The cartridge is rimmed (as were most rounds developed in the 1800s) and so is prone to jamming in modern box magazines, but this does not hinder its effectiveness in the military, where it is only seen in single-stack sniper rifle magazines and machine gun ammunition belts.
7.62x25mm, aka 7.62 Tokarev:
7.62 Tokarev was developed for the TT series of pistols, which replaced the M1895 Nagant revolver in Russian military service during World War II. 7.62 Tokarev is a small, light, extremely high-velocity round with a characteristically loud, cracking report and a bright muzzle flash. Although 7.62 Tokarev is in the very exclusive club of pistol rounds that can pierce modern body armor, such armor wasn't even a consideration in the 1950s, which is when the 7.62 Tokarev was replaced by the more sensible 9mm Makarov. 7.62 Tokarev is starting to see a comeback as an inexpensive but effective alternative to high-tech, armor-piercing pistol rounds like the FN 5.7x28mm and HK 4.6x30mm.
7.62x39mmR, aka 7.62 Nagant:
A highly unusual cartridge, the 7.62 Nagant has the dubious distinction of being a cartridge that is only able to fired in a single type of gun, the M1895 Nagant revolver. Nagant revolvers are now widely available and extremely inexpensive, easily found for under $150 at the time of this writing. The gun is just about as weird as the cartridge, both having unique design features that create a gas-sealing system to increase the revolver's muzzle velocity and in the process making one of the only revolvers in history that can be suppressed (silenced).
*Note: Although both NATO and Russian cartridges are called "7.62", the exact diameters are not identical. NATO 7.62 rounds are .308" in diameter, while Russian 7.62 rounds are .312" in diameter. Firing .308" bullets in a Russian firearm will result in poor accuracy, as the bullet is not firmly gripped by the larger .312" rifling. Firing .312" bullets through a .308" barrel can generate excessive pressure and potentially cause catastrophic failure of the casing or action, but is often done (accidentally or ignorantly) without incident.
*Note: You may have noticed that most of these 7.62 caliber cartridges are Russian. If you believe the folklore, this was a cost-cutting measure of the first and second world wars, as Russian military factories only needed one set of tools to make barrels and ammunition for everything from pistols to machine guns.
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Photos used under GFDL from Kalashnikov