Why the World Needs a Fighting Technique Encyclopedia

Somewhere right now, a 70-year-old karate master in Okinawa is performing a technique that has no written record. He learned it from his teacher, who learned it from his teacher, who learned it three generations ago. When this master retires, that technique — its precise mechanics, its history, its Japanese name — disappears forever.

This is happening across hundreds of martial arts, in dozens of countries, right now.

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Try searching for "all fighting techniques" online. You will find BJJ techniques on one website, judo throws on another, boxing combinations on a third, and karate kata on a fourth. Each site documents its own art in isolation, using its own naming conventions, with no connection to the others.

But here is what nobody tells you: the same technique often exists in multiple martial arts under different names.

A judo juji-gatame and a BJJ armbar are mechanically identical. A wrestling double leg and a judo morote-gari share the same biomechanics. A Muay Thai teep and a karate mae-geri use the same hip mechanics.

These connections are invisible because nobody has organized fighting techniques into a unified system.

Until now.

Fight Encyclopedia is the world's first attempt to catalog every known fighting technique across all martial arts and combat sports into a single, scientifically organized taxonomy.

We use a 7-level classification system inspired by biological taxonomy:

Class → Group → Family → SubFamily → Genus → Species → Variety

Just as biology classifies life from Kingdom down to Species, we classify techniques from the broadest category (like "Submission") down to the most specific variation (like "Standard Triangle from Closed Guard with Arm-In Finish").

Why This Structure Matters

When you organize techniques by biomechanical function rather than by which martial art claims them, you start to see patterns that were previously invisible:

• The triangle choke exists in BJJ, judo (as sankaku-jime), sambo, and MMA — but was always documented separately in each art
• Guard passes like the knee slice and toreando share a mechanical family even though they look completely different
• The omoplata was dormant for 70 years until Nino Schembri rediscovered it — connections like this become visible when you map the full taxonomy

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How many fighting techniques exist across all martial arts? Nobody has ever counted. Our current estimate, based on three years of research:

• 1,616 techniques documented so far across 9 classes
• 183 martial arts covered (striking, grappling, hybrid, and weapon-based)
• Target: 15,000+ techniques when the taxonomy is complete
• 43 data fields per technique — including biomechanical mechanism, danger rating, competition legality, Japanese name, counter techniques, and setup chains
• 925+ verified reference sources from textbooks in 10+ languages, academic papers, competition records, and historical archives

Every technique entry is evidence-based. Every claim has a citation. We do not publish unsourced information.

Wikipedia is extraordinary, but it was not designed for structured technical data. A Wikipedia article about the armbar is a narrative essay. Our armbar entry includes structured fields for biomechanical mechanism, position entry examples, danger rating (with a 1-10 scale), legality across IBJJF, IJF, ADCC, and UFC rulesets, counter techniques that link to their own pages, setup chains showing what comes before and after, and a Japanese name with kanji and romanization.

This structured approach means the data is not just readable — it is searchable, filterable, and machine-processable. You can browse all techniques by danger rating, filter by competition legality, or search by Japanese name.

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One of our most ambitious undertakings has been documenting the Japanese name for every technique in the taxonomy. Japan is the birthplace of judo, karate, aikido, and kendo — and Japanese terminology is used worldwide in martial arts training.

For techniques with traditional Japanese origins, we use the established kanji names (like 三角絞 for the triangle choke). For modern techniques that originated in Western countries, we follow the Rosetta Stone protocol — using the katakana transliterations that the Japanese BJJ community actually uses (like ニースライスパス for the knee slice pass).

This was verified across Japanese BJJ academies (Triforce BJJ, Shrapnel BJJ), the Japan Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation (JBJJF), Japanese BJJ publications (柔術B), and published Japanese-language instructional books.

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Fight Encyclopedia is built by ACENji Tech Solutions Inc., but the vision is bigger than any one company. Documenting every fighting technique in the world requires the martial arts community.

We are looking for volunteer contributors in several roles:

• Martial Arts Researchers — practitioners who can verify technique names, add missing entries, and ensure accuracy for their style
• Translators — native speakers of Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, and Korean who can verify terminology
• Content Writers — journalists and writers who can turn raw data into encyclopedia-quality descriptions
• Video Contributors — anyone who watches martial arts content on YouTube and can find the best instructional videos for each technique

Every contribution earns XP toward belt rank progression — from White Belt (0 XP) to Red Belt (50,000 XP).

We recently launched Fight IQ — the first chess-style martial arts puzzle game. Solve puzzles by finding the correct technique sequence to reach a submission. Daily puzzles, Elo ratings, and interactive lessons that teach technique chains through narrated scenarios.

Our digital library now has 2,000+ free martial arts books from Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, with a custom in-browser reader that tracks your reading progress.

And every week, the taxonomy grows. New techniques are researched, verified, and added — each one with the same 43-field depth, the same verified references, the same Japanese name.

The goal has always been the same: make sure no fighting technique is ever lost.

Fight Encyclopedia is free to browse at fightencyclopedia.com. If you want to help document the world's fighting techniques, apply to contribute or contact us.