Climbing grades explained: V, Font, French and British

Nobody explains this properly

You turn up to a wall and the holds have coloured tags with numbers on them. Someone says the blue one is a soft V4. Then you go outside and the guidebook says 6B+. Then you get on a rope and everything is suddenly 6a, except in Britain, where it is E1 5b and there are two numbers for reasons nobody has yet made clear to you.

Four systems, all of them in daily use, none of them measuring the same thing. Here is what each one is actually doing.

The V scale: bouldering, mostly American

V0 up to V17 at the moment, whole numbers, occasionally a plus or a minus at the easier end.

It comes from John Sherman, nicknamed Vermin, who put a difficulty ranking on the problems at Hueco Tanks in Texas in the early 1990s. It caught on in the United States and then, because most climbing gyms buy into whatever the biggest market uses, it caught on in a lot of indoor walls elsewhere too.

The useful thing about the V scale is that it is coarse. One number covers a fair spread of difficulty, which makes it quick to talk about and quick to tag a problem with. The unhelpful thing about the V scale is exactly the same, that it is coarse, so the gap between a soft V5 and a hard V5 can feel like most of a grade.

The Font scale: bouldering, mostly European

Numbers with letters attached, running 4, 5, 6A, 6A+, 6B, 6B+, 6C, 6C+, 7A and onwards to 9A.

This one comes from Fontainebleau, the sandstone forest south of Paris that has been a bouldering ground since long before anyone was tagging holds in a gym. Britain uses it, most of Europe uses it, and a lot of British indoor walls now grade in Font even where the clientele learned on V.

Font has more steps than the V scale, which is its whole point. Where the V scale gives you one number, Font gives you two or three, so a Font grade carries a bit more information about where in the band something sits. It is a finer ruler for the same wall.

Why the conversion charts never quite agree

Because one V grade often spans two or three Font grades, and you cannot cleanly divide something into pieces that do not fit.

Roughly, V1 sits around Font 5, V5 sits around Font 6C, V8 sits around Font 7B. Higher up, the two scales converge and start translating almost directly, so V16 and 8C+ are the same claim and V17 and 9A are the same claim. Down in the middle, where nearly everyone actually climbs, the mapping is a judgement call and different charts make it differently.

Worth knowing before you argue with one on the internet. The chart is not wrong, it is approximating.

The French sport grade

For routes, not boulders, and confusingly it looks like the Font scale but with lowercase letters: 4, 5, 6a, 6a+, 6b, 6b+, 6c, 7a, up to 9c.

Two things separate a French route grade from a Font boulder grade. The obvious one is the case of the letter, lowercase for routes and uppercase for boulders, which is the sort of distinction that only helps once you already know it. The other is that a route grade takes length and endurance into account. A 7a is not a single hard move, it is a whole pitch of sustained climbing, so a boulderer with a big single-move ceiling can get shut down on it and a lanky endurance climber can float it.

At the top end, the hardest sport route in the world remains Silence at Flatanger in Norway, first climbed by Adam Ondra in September 2017 and graded 9c. It has not been repeated.

The British system, which is two grades at once

Britain grades trad routes with a pair: an adjectival grade and a technical grade. Moderate, Difficult, Very Difficult, Severe, Hard Severe, Very Severe, Hard Very Severe, then E1 through to E12. Alongside it a technical number, 4a, 4b, 4c, 5a and upwards.

The adjectival grade is the whole experience. How serious it is, how good the gear is, how sustained, how frightening, how far you will go if it fails. The technical grade is just the hardest move.

Read them together and you learn something no single number can tell you. E1 5a is bold, with a hard-ish move and not much protecting you. E1 5c is safe and technical, with a nasty move over good gear. Same adjectival grade, completely different day out. This is the best thing about British grading and the reason it survives despite being incomprehensible to visitors.

What a grade is not

It is not a measurement. There is no instrument, no unit, no standard reference boulder in a vault in Paris. A grade is the collected opinion of the people who have climbed the thing, and opinions drift.

Which means all of the following are normal:

A grade is body-specific. Reach, finger size, ape index and flexibility all move the number. A problem with a long lock-off is harder if you are short, and a problem with a scrunched sit start is harder if you are tall. Neither of you is climbing it wrong.

A grade is style-specific. If you have spent two years on a steep board you will find the crimpy overhangs soft and the slabs sandbagged. That is not weakness, it is just what you have practised.

Indoor and outdoor grades are not the same currency. Indoor grades are set by one person for one wall and are calibrated against that wall's other problems. A first outdoor session at what you think is your grade is a well-known way to have a humbling afternoon.

Different areas grade differently. Some venues are famously stiff. British grit, in particular, has a long and proud tradition of making people cry.

Grades drift over decades. Holds break, footholds get polished, and beta improves. A problem graded in 1995 has had thirty years of people finding the easier way to do it.

How to actually use them

Grades are useful. The problem is only ever what you do with them.

Use them to pick what to get on. That is their real job. A guidebook grade tells you whether a route is worth walking to today, and a tag on a wall tells you whether a problem is a warm-up or a project. That is a genuinely valuable service.

Use bands rather than numbers. Knowing you climb around Font 6B on a good day is more honest and more useful than saying you are a 6B climber. The band is the truth, the number is the highlight.

Judge a session on the climbing. Whether you moved well, whether you tried properly, whether you learned the sequence. Three good attempts on something too hard is a better session than flashing five things you already knew you could do.

Ignore the number when it is making you worse. The most common way grades damage climbing is by stopping people getting on things. If you avoid a problem because the tag says a number you have decided is above you, you have let a piece of tape make a training decision for you.

Nobody who is good at this got there by only climbing things they could already do.

The bit worth tracking

The number matters much less than the shape of what you climb. Two people can both be climbing Font 6C and have entirely different sets of holes in their climbing, one who never touches a slab, one who has not been on an overhang since March.

If you log your sessions in Sendit, that pattern comes out on its own. Not just the grade you sent but the angle it was on, the style it was, and how many attempts it took, which over a few months tells you far more about what to work on than any single number ever will.

The short version

The V scale is coarse American bouldering, Font is finer European bouldering, French lowercase grades are for routes and include endurance, and British trad gives you two grades because seriousness and difficulty are different things. Conversion charts approximate because the scales do not line up.

None of it is measured. It is all opinion, gathered and averaged, and it exists to help you choose what to climb rather than to tell you who you are.

Sources: the V scale's origin at Hueco Tanks is attributed to John Sherman; Silence, 9c, Flatanger, Adam Ondra, September 2017, as reported by Planetmountain and the BMC.