AFK

AFK

[MUD] Abbrev. for "Away From Keyboard". Used to notify others that you will be momentarily unavailable online. eg. "Let's not go kill that frost giant yet, I need to go AFK to make a phone call". Often MUDs will have a command to politely inform others of your absence when they try to talk with you. The term is not restricted to MUDs, however, and has become common in many chat situations, from IRC to Unix talk.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

In addition to "Away From Keyboard", it's taken on the somewhat wiseass meaning of "A Free Kill" (mostly in FPS games) as you're not there to fight back. Can be annoying when a player is afk, especially in games such as Counter-Strike where one character is picked to carry the bomb. If they're not there, the team cannot win except by attrition (i.e. killing all of the other team instead of blowing up the target site.) because they can neither drop the bomb for another player, nor can they set it.