Who names jiu-jitsu techniques

Every gym uses a dozen words nobody has ever explained: kimura, ezekiel, omoplata, berimbolo, d'arce. They sound like a technical vocabulary. They are almost all people's surnames, and almost none of them belongs to whoever invented the technique.

1. The name certifies fame, not authorship

In four of these stories the person the hold is named after did not invent it. Kimura, Ezequiel Paraguassú, Joe D'Arce and Eddie Bravo turned up with holds that already existed in judo, in catch wrestling or in American scholastic wrestling. They made them recognisable — and in jiu-jitsu that is what gets rewarded.

2. The naming is almost always done by somebody else

• The press: De La Riva guard after a win over Royler Gracie, and in all likelihood the kimura too, as “kimuriana”.
• An outside coach: the d'arce, from the man who kept watching him win.
• A friend: the brabo, from an email address.
• The gym itself: the ezekiel, from “the one Ezequiel does”.

The one declared exception is the twister, where the man behind it could have attached his own surname and chose a descriptive name instead — so as not to confuse it with a technique that was already called that.

3. Many of the names are not Brazilian

Samuel Braga, who developed the berimbolo, puts it plainly: “*In Brazil we never gave names to positions, we just explained them*”.

Berimbolo, twister and d'arce were born, or stuck, outside Brazil, in an English-speaking environment, on Brazilian or Japanese techniques. It is also why the attributions are always disputed: the person who did the technique and the person who named it are often different people, on different continents, years apart.

4. Descriptive names age better

Omoplata means shoulder blade. Gogoplata means throat. *Guarda pudim* meant it made you wobble. They are names that explain what happens, and somebody hearing them for the first time understands something.

Jiu-jitsu has almost always preferred the surname. The result is a vocabulary you learn by heart instead of working it out — good to tell stories about, hard work for anyone starting out.

How these pages are written

• Sources are stated. Very few period documents on the history of jiu-jitsu exist online: almost everything is a story passed along. Where something is documented we say so, and where it is handed down we say that too.
• Doubt is stated. Every page has a “what we do not know” section. That is not modesty: it is how you avoid turning a supposition into a fact for the sole reason that somebody wrote it down.
• We add, we do not tear down. None of these stories is here to take credit away from anyone. They are here to explain how a technique ends up with a name, which is almost always more interesting than the short version.