ok so ive been listening to hf a lot lately and people are constantly saying stuff like QSL and QRZ and QRM and i have no idea what any of it means. like is there a list somewhere? i tried googling it but i kept getting results that were just wikipedia pages that werent very helpful. also people say things like 73 and 88 which i gather are like greetings but im not totally sure. my elmer told me to just pick it up as i go but honestly that feels like it would take forever and i keep missing what people are actually trying to say during a contact. does anyone have like a plain english version of the most common ones you actually hear? not looking for the full international Q code list or anything just like the ones that come up all the time

yeah the Q codes go way back to like the telegraph days so theres a ton of them but honestly in practice you only ever hear maybe a dozen or so on a regular basis. QSL just means confirmed or acknowledged, like yes i got your message. QRZ is asking whos calling, youll hear that a lot when someone is running a pileup and calling out for whoever just called them. QRM is interference from other stations, human made stuff, and QRN is the natural stuff like static from thunderstorms. QSB is fading, like the signal going up and down. QTH is your location. QRP means low power, under 5 watts usually. and yeah 73 is just like best regards or goodbye basically, its kind of the universal ham sign off. 88 means love and kisses, usually sent between operators who know each other well or sometimes from a male op to a female op but thats kinda old fashioned now i guess. honestly just keep listening and theyll start clicking into place pretty fast, took me maybe a couple weeks before i stopped having to think about them

im pretty new too but one thing that helped me was the ARRL has a page with common abbreviations and Q codes that isnt as overwhelming as the full ITU list. also a lot of the shorthand you hear isnt even Q codes, like OM means old man which is just how guys refer to each other, and YL is young lady which they call any female operator regardless of age lol. TU means thank you, ur means your, and pse means please. those show up constantly especially in CW but people say them out loud on phone too sometimes. once you get the hang of it it kind of becomes automatic