Cue sports (sometimes spelled cuesports), also known as billiard sports,^[1][2] are a wide variety of games of skill A game of skill is a game where the outcome is determined mainly by mental and/or physical skill, rather than by pure chance generally played with a cue stick A cue stick , is an item of sporting equipment essential to the games of pool, snooker and carom billiards. It is used to strike a ball, usually the cue ball. Cues are tapered sticks, typically about 58 inches (1.5 m) long and 18–21 ounces (510–600 g). Most cues are made of wood, but occasionally the wood is covered or bonded with other which is used to strike billiard balls A Billiard ball is a small, hard ball used in cue sports, such as carom billiards, pool, and snooker. The number, type, diameter, color, and pattern of the balls differ depending upon the specific game being played. Various specific ball properties such as hardness, friction coefficient and resilience are very important to the finer points of, moving them around a cloth Baize is a coarse woollen cloth, sometimes called "felt" in American English based on a similarity in appearance.[citation needed]-covered billiards table A billiard table or billiards table is a bounded table on which billiards-type games (cue sports) are played. In the modern era, all billiards tables, regardless of whether for carom billiards, pool or snooker, provide a flat surface usually made of quarried slate, that is covered with cloth and surrounded by rubber cushions, with the whole bounded by rubber cushions The following is an encyclopedic glossary of traditional English-language terms used in the three overarching cue sports disciplines: pocket billiards , which denotes a host of games played on a table with six pockets; carom billiards referring to the various carom games played on a table without pockets; and snooker, played on a large pocket.

Historically, the umbrella term was billiards. While that familiar name is still employed by some as a generic label for all such games, the word's usage has splintered into more exclusive