Tobacco industry glossary and acronyms

Tobacco industry documents often contain unique terms, acronyms and phrases unfamiliar to people who work outside the industry. This page is an attempt to catalog those terms.

Add terms in alphabetical order and bold the first mention of each term. Glossaries of terms can be found by searching tobacco industry document databases using search terms like "glossary." Such glossaries are often contained within employee training and orientation manuals.

The bottom of this page contains links to tobacco industry glossaries on a variety of subjects, like sales, consumer testing, scientific analysis, etc., found within the documents.

=Terms=
 * Ammonia Technology - The use of ammonia in tobacco to freebase nicotine, mask and improve flavors. See also Freebase nicotine and Ammonia
 * Antis - short for "anti-smokers" or public health advocates
 * Bright - A type of cigarette tobacco grown from Florida to Virginia, flue cured without direct contact of fumes, commonly used to give smoothness, mildness, and color to the blend.
 * Burley - A type of tobacco grown mainly in Kentucky and Tennessee, air cured, and commonly used to give richness and body to the blend.
 * Cannibalization - when a spinoff product of one brand erodes the established market of the "parent" brand (e.g., the introduction of Marlboro Lights would cannibalize the Marlboro regular brand market).
 * Cased Burley -Burley strip tobacco which has been sprayed with casing, a flavoring solution, after drying.
 * Casing - A solution of flavoring additives used for spraying onto tobacco or stems.
 * Cut filler - The final blend of tobacco, flavored and cut, used to make cigarettes. At Philip Morris, it consists of Burley, Bright and imported tobaccos, stems, blended leaf, and expanded tobacco, at a moisture content of about 13%.
 * DIET -Dry Ice Expanded Tobacco.
 * Dryer - A unit which dries, that is, removes moisture from tobacco, or blended leaf by exposing the product to heated air. The dryer may be a long oven through which a belt moves, or a rotating cylinder through which heated air is passed.
 * Expanded Tobacco (ET) -Tobacco which has been increased in size in a process of cellular expansion followed by freeze drying.(See Dry Ice Expanded Tobacco, or DIET). Expanding increases tobacco volume by +/-100% but greatly reduces flavor. Analagous procedure to "puffed wheat" and "puffed rice." Expanded tobacco is used to reduce tobacco weight per cigarette and reduce FTC tar readings.
 * Filter plug - the cigarette filter
 * FUBYAS - Acronym stands for "First Usual Brand Younger Adult Smoker," a tobacco industry term for young people. Mostly used by RJR.  Also See YAS, YAMS, YAFS and YAX.
 * Impact - The organoleptic sensation caused by nicotine. Impact is often described by consumers as throat catch, throat hit, throat grip, etc. Cigarette companies define impact as the sudden sharp but short-lived sensation (typically less than one second in duration) which is noticed immediately the smoke makes contact with the back of the throat. A physiological explanation of the impact sensation is that nicotine causes smooth muscle to contract, and the amount of contraction is proportional to the dose of nicotine applied to it. In general, the more nicotine, the stronger the contraction and the stronger the impact sensation.
 * Mercosur -Treaty establishing a common market between the Argentine Republic, the Federal Republic of Brazil, the Republic of Paraguay and the Eastern Republic of Uruguay.
 * P & S Dryer - A "Proctor and Schwartz" dryer. It reduces the moisture content of sprayed Burley before it is cased and blended with the Bright.
 * Plug wrap - the paper that goes around the cigarette filter.
 * Puffed tobacco - Expanded tobacco, created using gaseous processes like those used to puff wheat or rice used in cereals. See Puffed tobacco.
 * Ripper Shorts- Reusable tobacco removed from rejected cigarettes in the ripping operation. Contains many short pieces.
 * Ripping - The operation of removing the tobacco from large quantities of rejected cigarettes using processing equipment, such as a feeder, steam cylinder, ripping cylinder, shaker and air separator.
 * Recon - Reconstituted tobacco.
 * Shorts - Short pieces of tobacco which fall from the ends of just processed cigarettes prior to being packaged. Designated as Class I by-products.
 * Stem - The midrib of a tobacco leaf.
 * Turkish tobacco - One of three major types of cigarette tobacco, grown in the Mediterranean area (mainly Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, and Yugoslavia, air cured, commonly used to give extra aroma and richness to the blend.
 * Reconstituted Tobacco Blend (RCB, or "recon")-A sheet made of tobacco by-products (e.g., stems and stalks) by use of natural tobacco gums or synthetic additive gums. Also known as reconstituted blend.
 * WSC - Acronym for "whole smoke condensate."
 * YAFS - Acronym referring to "Young Adult Female Smokers."
 * YAMS - Acronym for "Young Adult Male Smokers"
 * YAX - Acronym referring to both young adult male and female smokers combined, as one term.

Links to industry documents containing glossaries

 * Philip Morris Quality Systems Glossary of Terms - dated March 22, 2000]
 * Undated Brown & Williamson Glossary of Terms - (4 pp) seems to contain terms regarding inventory, stocking, sales
 * 1989 Brown & Williamson Advertising/Marketing Glossary
 * Undated Dimon Tobacco glossary - seems to contains terms referring to stages of production and manufacture of tobacco (17 pp)
 * Philip Morris WSA (Worldwide Scientific Affairs) Draft Glossary of Terms - March 25, 2004. Contains terms regarding scientific testing and analysis of cigarettes, phsyiological effects of smoking e.g., contains terms like "absorbed dose", "delivery," "dose response," "exposure," "irritant," etc. 25 pp.
 * Glossary of terms used in subjective evaluation of cigarette smoking characteristics 78pp, undated, from Brown & Williamson. Defines taste and other sensory terms like "peppery," "biting", "burnt," "Impact," "fecal" (says "see also 'barnyard')",  "tooth-etching", etc.
 * Cigarette Design Glossary- undated, 4 pp, Philip Morris.