Abseil

In British English, abseiling (from the German abseilen, "to rope down") is the process of descending on a fixed rope.

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It is also known as: rappelling or rappeling (American English), abbing (British slang), rapping (American slang), roping down, roping, seiling or jumping (Australian slang), snapling, snappling or snappeling (Israeli slang).

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Abseiling is used in a number of applications, including:

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• Rock climbers returning to the base of a climb or to a point where they then try a new route.
• Recreational abseilers, who return to the top of the line by track, stairs or other methods and abseil again.
• Recreational canyoners, who travel down mountainous watercourses where waterfalls or cliffs may need to be descended and simply jumping is too dangerous or impossible.
• Recreational caving, where underground pitches are accessed using this method.
• Adventure racers, whose events often including abseiling and other rope work.
• Industrial/Commercial workers, who may use abseiling techniques to access parts of structures or buildings so as to perform maintenance, cleaning or construction. (eg window cleaners, railway scalers, quarry workers, etc.)
• Access to wildfire by rapelling from a hovering helicopter.
• Military or police applications, such as rapid deployment from helicopters or access to buildings as part of raids, etc.
• Confined spaces access, such as investigating ballast tanks and other areas of ships.
• Rescue applications, such as accessing injured people or accident sites (vehicle or aircraft) and extracting the casualty using abseiling techniques.

The majority of abseiling is done using specially designed devices called descenders which allow the abseiler to connect themselves to the rope and control their rate of descent (through adjusting the level of friction applied to the rope by the device). There is also the older, but more uncomfortable, method of wrapping the rope around one's body for friction, as in the Dulfersitz or Geneva methods popularly used by climbers in the 1960s.

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Abseil: Practice and equipment ►



 

American English: American English (AmE) is the form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. It is the primary language used in the United States. As of 2005, more than two-thirds of native speakers of English use various forms of American English. American English is also sometimes calle...

British slang: British slang is English language slang used in Great Britain. While some slang words and phrases are used throughout all of Britain (e.g. knackered, meaning "exhausted"), others are restricted to smaller regions, even to small geographical groups. London has its own varieties of slang, one of the m...

Slang: Slang is the non-standard use of words in a language of a particular social group, and sometimes the creation of new words or importation of words from another language. It is a type of neologism. Slang can be described as deviating away from standard language use. Slang functions in two ways; the c...