Fandom ship names
Slash, ampersand, or blend?
Fandoms name pairings three different ways, and the punctuation is not decoration — on AO3, A/B and A&B mean different relationships. This page keeps the formats straight.
The formats, precisely
| Format | Example | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| A/B (slash) | Stiles/Derek | A romantic and/or sexual pairing. This is the convention AO3's tagging system is built on. |
| A&B (ampersand) | Stiles&Derek | A platonic relationship — friendship, family, teammates. On AO3 this is a separate, searchable category, not a stylistic variant of the slash. |
| AxB / A x B | StilesxDerek | Romantic pairing, common off-AO3 (older forums, some anime fandoms). In some communities the order implies roles; treat ordering as meaningful, not alphabetical. |
| The blend | Sterek | The portmanteau — used as the ship's name in discussion, tags and titles. Fandom blends cut harder than couple names: St- + -erek keeps almost nothing of "Stiles" and still works, because the audience shares context a wedding guest doesn't. |
Why fandom blends cut differently
A couple name has to work for strangers reading a wedding sign. A ship name only has to work for people who already know both characters — so fandom optimizes for brevity and distinctiveness in search, not instant readability. That's why this site's generator has a dedicated Ship style: it re-ranks the same splices toward the short, hard cuts (Sterek, Destiel, Jonerys) instead of the smooth ones.
Before you coin one
- Search the fandom first. Most established pairings already have a community-standard name. Coining a rival blend doesn't replace it — it just splits the tag, and your posts become invisible to the main conversation.
- Check the blend against the formats. If the pairing is platonic in your work, tag A&B even if you use the blend in the title; readers filter on the punctuation.
- Three or more characters? Group ships usually stack initials or syllables (NarSasSak-style). The group name combiner blends three names the same way.
Everything here is convention, not law — individual fandoms bend all of it. When a community's own wiki disagrees with this page, the community is right.