ok so ive been licensed for about 3 months now and i keep hearing people use these weird shorthand things like QSL and QTH and QRM and honestly there are so many i cant keep track. i know QSL means like... confirming contact? and QTH is your location but beyond that im totally lost. someone told me there's a whole list of them but every time i look it up i just find like a massive table with hundreds of codes and i dont even know which ones actually get used vs which ones are just technically in the rules somewhere but nobody actually says.

also is it just Q codes or are there other abbreviations too because ive seen stuff like 73 and 88 and DE and AR and all that. are those the same thing or different. sorry if this is a dumb question im still figuring all this out

not a dumb question at all, this stuff genuinely takes a while to absorb. so the Q codes originally came from maritime and commercial telegraphy, they were designed so operators could communicate across language barriers quickly in CW. ham radio kind of adopted them and a lot of them stuck around especially on HF and in CW operation. you're right that QSL is acknowledgment or confirmation, QTH is location, QRM is man-made interference (other stations basically), QRN is natural static, QSB is fading signal, QRZ is who is calling me, QRP means low power operation and a lot of guys use that as an identifier for their whole operating style now. QRO is the opposite, running high power. honestly the ones you'll hear constantly are probably QSL, QTH, QRM, QRN, QSB, QRZ, and maybe QRT which means shutting down or going off the air.

the other stuff like 73 and 88 are procedural codes, totally separate origin. 73 is best regards, 88 is love and kisses which is usually only sent to someone you actually know. DE just means from, like W1ABC DE K5XYZ means K5XYZ is calling W1ABC. AR means end of transmission basically. those are prosigns and they come from the old telegraph era too. once you start doing more CW contacts it all becomes second nature pretty fast.

yeah the big table is overwhelming, dont bother memorizing all of them. most hams only actually use maybe 15-20 in regular conversation. i was in the same boat as you when i started and what helped me was just getting on the air and listening, you pick them up way faster that way than staring at a chart. also QSY means changing frequency which you'll hear a lot, and QRX means standby or wait a minute. those two come up all the time