| La ལ་ | A mountain pass. It is the commonest element in the region's place names, and la-dwags, the region's own name, is generally glossed as the land of passes — a place defined by its exits rather than its centre. |
| Gonpa དགོན་པ་ | A monastery; the word means a solitary or remote place. Ladakhi gonpas hold land, grain stores, records, paintings and the calendar, which is why they function as the region's archive and not only as its clergy. |
| Cham འཆམ་ | The masked ritual dance performed by monks at a monastery's annual festival. |
| Losar ལོ་གསར་ | New year. Ladakhi Losar falls about two months before the Tibetan one, in the eleventh month rather than the first. |
| Chorten མཆོད་རྟེན་ | A stupa. They stand at village entrances and on passes and are passed on the left, so a chorten in the middle of a road creates a fixed direction of travel around it. |
| Chang ཆང་ | Barley beer, poured at births, marriages, harvests and negotiations. To refuse the third pouring is the polite way to stop. |
| Mar མར་ | Butter. It is a currency as much as a food — used in tea, in lamps, in offerings, in sculpture, and kept long past the point at which it would be called fresh. |
| Ngamphe | Roasted barley flour, the Ladakhi word for what is elsewhere called tsampa (རྩམ་པ་). Kholak is the stiff dough kneaded from it in the bowl; zan is the cooked porridge. |
| Yura | An irrigation channel taken off a glacier-fed stream and led along a contour, sometimes for kilometres, to a village's fields. The whole settlement pattern of Ladakh is a map of where a yura can be run. |
| Churpon | The village water-master, chosen by rotation or election, who allocates water from the yura by turns and by the clock, settles disputes, and calls out the collective work of clearing the channel each spring. In a place with one crop and no rain, this is the most consequential office in the village. |
| Rebo | The black tent of the Changpa, woven from yak hair, with a hearth in the middle and a smoke slit above it. It is warm because of the fire and the fleece inside, not because the cloth is dense. |
| Khang-chen and khang-bu | The main house and the small house. Under the older Ladakhi arrangement the estate passed undivided to one heir who held the khang-chen, while the retiring parents moved to the khang-bu with a fixed allowance of land — a mechanism to stop a holding being subdivided until it could feed nobody. |
| Amchi | A practitioner of Sowa Rigpa, the Tibetan medical system, trained through a lineage and a set of texts, compounding medicines from plants gathered on the high pastures. In many villages the amchi was, until recently, the only medical practitioner at all. |
| Julley | Hello, goodbye, please and thank you, in one word. It is the first Ladakhi word every visitor learns and it carries most of the region's daily courtesy on its own. |