VOCALOID Slang Dictionary: A Complete Beginner's Guide to the Scene's Lingo, from “Your Highness” to “Vocal Tuning”

Every scene has its own Morse code. This dictionary doesn't try to be exhaustive — it just wants the moment you open the comments section, drop into a livestream's danmaku, or flip through a doujin fair listing to stop leaving you blank.

VOCALOID culture has been around long enough to build a whole highly compressed slang system. Some of it comes from niconico's danmaku culture, some from organic drift inside the Chinese cover scene, some is nothing more than a phonetic remix of the Japanese original. To a newcomer it reads like a wall; to an old fan it's the secret handshake that identifies their own in three sentences. This article sorts the lot by theme, giving each entry a definition, an origin, and a note on how it's actually used — and it flags the handful of traps newcomers step on hardest.

1. People: Who's Who

2. Numbers: Hall of Fame, Legend, and Your First Reaction

niconico has its own system for rating works, and the Chinese scene has adopted it almost word for word:

• Hall of Fame (でんどう): a single hits 100,000 views and the system awards a badge automatically
• Legend (伝説): 1,000,000 views — a much rarer badge
• Saturday / Sunday Hall of Fame: a leftover from early chart culture; these days it just means “made the chart”

The Chinese scene also has its own vocabulary: “god-tier track” (a song of absurd quality), “obscure god-tier track” (great but barely watched, usually paired with “underrated,” like the title of this site's keeno column), and “gateway track” (the first song that pulls you into VOCALOID).

3. Conduct: What Everyone's Actually Doing

1. Posting and creating

• 投稿 (posting): publishing a work on a video platform. Note this is the scene's word for “publish” — nobody says “release a song”
• 配信 / digital release: putting a track up on streaming, as opposed to a physical CD release
• Reloaded / rework: the original producer re-arranging an old track — DECO*27 is the master of this; 《ヒバナ》《モザイクロール》《二息歩行》 all have Reloaded versions
• 受け / received track: a rework inspired by someone else's piece, e.g. a track “in wowaka's style”

2. Covers and vocal tuning

3. Community rituals

1. Relay / cover relay: a group piece where everyone sings a stretch — the scene's ritual of togetherness
2. ミックス回 (mixer showcase): mixers competing on the same track while the danmaku scores each one
3. Year-end recap: a fixed format in which the year's notable tracks get run through

4. Platforms and Labels: The Names You Need to Know

5. Terms Only the Chinese Scene Uses

The Chinese VOCALOID scene has borrowed plenty from the Japanese side while growing its own vocabulary:

• Licensed / unlicensed: whether a cover has the original creator's permission — “this is a licensed cover” is a self-declaration that carries real weight
• 调校 (old) / 调声 (new): the Chinese scene used to say 调校; in recent years it has settled on 调声
• Hitting play (上键): danmaku culture for “the good bit made me hit play / buy the disc”
• V-family (V 家): the Chinese shorthand for the VOCALOID family, covering voicebank characters and the whole creative ecosystem
• Track art (曲绘): the illustration that comes with a song — the scene's word for Japanese “イラスト”
• Ear-hook (抓耳): a melody that sticks the moment you hear it — the most common word used about DECO*27

6. Listening Vocabulary: From “Sounds Good” to Saying Exactly What's Good

Want to sound like you know what you're talking about in the comments? Swap the vague for the specific:

6.5 Era Slang: Dating a Work by Its Vocabulary

The VOCALOID scene has a sharp sense of era, and a batch of slang marks out different “ages”:

7. Danmaku Culture: The Other Half of the Page

The danmaku on niconico and bilibili has its own slang, a separate language from the comments below:

• Homophone danmaku: Japanese lyrics transliterated into meaningless Chinese — e.g. the chorus of 《ローリンガール》. These danmaku become part of the song's memory in their own right
• Milestone danmaku (“N people came”): marks a view-count moment on the video, like “XX, brace for the drop”
• Etiquette danmaku: coordinated mass-posting at a fixed timestamp (the “39” on Miku's birthday) — basically a synchronized ritual
• “High energy ahead”: invented by the Chinese scene to flag the climax; it has since crossed over into general internet slang
• “Wild subtitle group”: volunteers translating the lyrics live in the danmaku — the infrastructure of cross-language spread

8. Advanced Terms: When You Start Hanging With Creators

If you already have all of the above, you're no longer just a listener. Here's the vocabulary of the creator crowd:

Appendix: An Argument That Will Never End

“Is VOCALOID's charm that it sounds human, or that it doesn't?” — an aesthetic debate that has run in this scene for sixteen years. One side holds that the ultimate goal is passing for real (the path AI vocal synthesis is on). The other holds that it is precisely the inhuman quality that separates it from pop and makes it a category of its own. keeno's “hoarse voice,” wowaka's “speed,” DECO*27's “sweet-and-bitter mismatch” are all answers from the “not human is plenty good” side. A slang dictionary that runs this far cannot dodge the scene's fundamental split — there is no standard answer, but every answer deserves to be sung in earnest.

9. Scene Studies: Putting the Dictionary to Work

Definitions done. Now three “live exchanges” — a look at how this slang actually flows in context:

Conclusion: Slang Is the Ticket, Not the Pass

In the end, slang is only the ticket. This scene's real pass has always been that plain sentence — thank you for writing this song.

Definitions in this article draw on ニコニコ大百科, the VOCALOID entries on Moegirl, and established usage in the Chinese VOCALOID scene (cover scene / bilibili). Entry usage may shift with platform and era, so defer to whichever community you actually hang out in. Anything here about labels and licensing policies is not legal advice — check the latest official notices from the rights holders.

VOCALOID Slang Dictionary: An Intro to the Scene's Lingo, from “Your Highness” to “Vocal Tuning”

Every scene has its own Morse code. This dictionary doesn't try to cover everything — it just wants you to stop being lost when you open the comments.

Spend enough time in the VOCALOID scene and you'll realize everyone is speaking roughly another language: “This tuning is unreal,” “the 中之人,” “Hall of Fame track,” “licensed cover”… to a newcomer these words are a wall. Today we clear them up in one go.

People: Who's Who

Works: What Counts as What

• Hall of Fame track: the 100,000-view threshold on ニコニコ
• Legend (伝説) track: a million views — a different order of magnitude
• Inspired / 受け track: a rework inspired by someone else's piece
• Official track: a work formally commissioned and collected by a rights holder like Crypton

Conduct: What Everyone's Doing

1. Cover (カバー): re-singing someone else's original in your own voice — permission culture is the bottom line
2. Reloaded: the original P re-arranging an old track — DECO*27 is the master of this
3. Retuning cover: leave the song alone, only re-do the vocal parameters — the “editing art of sound”
4. Collab track: P + illustrator + animator + mixer working the pipeline together

Handy Phrases: Surviving the Comments

In the end, slang is only the ticket. This scene's real pass has always been that plain sentence: thank you for writing this song.

Definitions in this article draw on ニコニコ大百科 and established usage in the Chinese VOCALOID scene; if usage varies by region, go with whichever circle you actually hang out in.