BitTorrent terms

This is a list of commonly used terms relevant to BitTorrent.

Peer - a person using the torrent who has not yet downloaded the entire file. Peers are sometimes called leechers, as they are still downloading the file and generally have so far downloaded more than they have uploaded.

Seeder - a person using the torrent who has finished downloading all the files, and is sharing them so that other people can download from them. Seeders are the opposite of peers.

Torrent - the file you download from the server (e.g. Open Source Torrents) that contains information about the files being distributed and has a .torrent extension. A torrent does not actually include files in it, it simply gives your torrent program the information it needs to find the file and download it. These files are generally very small in size, most around a few kilobytes.