How Many Types of Knots Are There?

Every knot session ends with a Pathfinder asking the same thing: how many types of knots are there? The question seems to call for one number, and a search turns up several, all correct and all different: a 1944 book numbered 3,857 entries, mathematicians have passed 2 billion, and the portal's knots and lashings catalog lists 195. This guide shows where each count comes from, walks through the knot families with 15 examples from the catalog and separates documented history from sailors' legend.

🔢So, how many types of knots are there?

There is no official number. Reference works count different things, and each one is right by its own standard.

Even the word knot changes size. On page 12 of his book, Clifford W. Ashley explains that it has three senses: in the broadest, any deliberate complication in a rope, except coils and hanks made for storage; in the second, leaving out bends, hitches, splices and sinnets; in the narrowest, only the knob at the end that keeps a rope from slipping through a hole.

Sources: Ashley (1944), English Wikipedia, Burton (SoCG 2020), Thistlethwaite (2025) and the portal's catalog.

🧩What are the types of knots and their names?

At sea, Ashley records, knots fall into four classes: a hitch ties a rope to another object, a bend joins two rope ends, a splice weaves the strands of the rope together, and the word knot is kept for stoppers, loops and everything else. The Wikipedia article Knot breaks the list into 15 categories, and one knot can sit in more than one.

In the club, the families look like this. Stopper knots thicken the end of a rope, like the Figure 8 Knot and the Ashley Stopper Knot. Bends join two ropes: Sheet Bend, Carrick Bend, Zeppelin Bend, Hunter's Bend and Ashley Bend. The Square Knot sits in the same catalog group, but it is a binding knot, made for parcels and bandages. Hitches and lashings have their own guide in essential knots and lashings for Pathfinders.

Among the decorative knots are the Turk's Head Knot, the Monkey's Fist Knot and the Double Matthew Walker Knot. The Sheepshank shortens a rope without cutting it, the FG Knot joins fishing lines and the Shoelace Bow (Fieggen Method) is a quick way to tie the shoelace bow, which, according to the same Wikipedia, is a square knot with both ends slipped.

The portal's knots and lashings catalog has its own split: 135 knots, 41 hitches and 19 lashings, in 10 categories.

Difficulty according to the portal's catalog (October 2026).

📘What is the Ashley Book of Knots, and why are 3,857 entries not 3,857 knots?

Clifford Warren Ashley (1881-1947), an artist and sailor from New Bedford, in the United States, spent six weeks of 1904 aboard the whaling ship Sunbeam. The Ashley Book of Knots came out in 1944 from Doubleday, after more than 11 years of work, with 3,857 numbered entries and about 7,000 illustrations. Each entry number, cited as ABOK, works like the knot's ID card.

But an entry does not mean a different knot. The same knot gets several numbers when it shows up in several uses or forms: the Square Knot has ten, from #74 to #2580, including #1204; the Sheepshank has six, starting with #1152; the Sheet Bend opens the book as #1 and comes back as #1431. Going the other way, one whole family, the Turk's Head Knot, fills chapter 17 on its own with 124 entries, as the guide to decorative knots for the club explains.

The book also changed: it gained #1425A, the Hunter's Bend, in 1979 and took in corrections from the International Guild of Knot Tyers in 1991. In the portal's catalog, 105 of the 195 items have an ABOK number; the Zeppelin Bend, for example, never made it into the 1944 edition.

🏺What is the oldest knot in the world, and what is the meaning of the Hercules knot?

Nobody knows who tied the first knot. One of the oldest records is the Antrea net, a fishing net made of willow fiber, more than 10,000 years old, dug up in 1914 on the Karelian Isthmus, now Russian territory.

Among the club's knots, the Square Knot, also called the reef knot, has the longest record. Because it lies flat against cloth, it was already closing bandages almost 2,000 years ago, and the Greeks and Romans called it the Hercules knot (in Greek, herakleotikon hamma).

So here is what the Hercules knot means: the name points to the hero of Greek mythology and refers to the square knot itself. In his Natural History, from the first century, Pliny the Elder wrote that wounds bound with it healed much faster and that the discovery was Hercules' own. Around the same time, the Greek physician Heraklas included the knot in a list of 16 surgical knots and loops, preserved in the Medical Collections of Oribasius, physician to the Roman emperor Julian.

🏷️Where do knot names come from?

Many names tell the job the knot did on board, like those of the Bowline and the Sheet Bend, explained in the guide to sailor knots. Others honor people: the Hunter's Bend carries the surname of Dr. Edward Hunter, although Brazilian Portuguese translates it word for word as nó do caçador, the hunter's knot.

Some names hold mysteries. For the Carrick Bend, on record since 1783, there are three theories: Ormonde Castle, in Carrick-on-Suir, Ireland; Carrick Roads, a bay in England; or the carrack, a medieval ship. As for Matthew Walker, who gives his name to the Double Matthew Walker Knot, nobody even knows who he was. And the letters in the FG Knot have explanations for every taste, from Fine Grip to a possible inventor named Fred Goldman, according to Animated Knots.

The most famous legend belongs to the Zeppelin Bend. In 1976, the American magazine Boating published the account of a former US Navy instructor: Charles Rosendahl, the commanding officer, allowed only this knot on the airship Los Angeles. The Zeppelin name was born there, and the airship researcher Giles Camplin disputes the story. In the 1960s, the caver Bob Thrun had already published the same bend.

Name origins according to English Wikipedia, Animated Knots and the reports in The Times (1978) and Boating (1976).

🗓️Are new knots still being invented?

Yes, and Ashley himself made the list. In a fleet of oyster boats on Delaware Bay, he saw a huge knot at the end of a halyard and copied it from memory; days later, up close, he saw it was just a Figure 8 Knot in the swollen end of a worn rope. The copy became the Ashley Stopper Knot (#526). The Ashley Bend (#1452) appeared in the book with no name, only the date 2/3/34, and Cyrus L. Day named it in 1947. Ashley closed his book by saying there will always be new knots as long as rope finds new uses.

On October 6, 1978, the British newspaper The Times presented the Hunter's Bend as new, crediting Dr. Hunter. Phil D. Smith had already published it in 1953 as the rigger's bend. The stir led to the founding of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, which today has about 1,000 members. In 1982, Ian Fieggen created the Shoelace Bow (Fieggen Method).

➗How many knots are there in the world, according to knot theory?

To mathematicians, a knot is a closed curve, like a rope with its ends joined. The simplest one, after the loop with no knot at all, is the trefoil, with three crossings. The only one with four, the figure-eight knot, appears when you tie a Figure 8 Knot in a rope and join the ends.

Counting these knots is one of the oldest problems in knot theory. The count began in the 19th century, when people thought knots might explain the structure of atoms, and the first serious knot table, by Tait, Kirkman and Little (1876 to 1899), reached 10 crossings. In 2020, Benjamin A. Burton listed 352,152,252 prime knots (those that are not the sum of two smaller knots) with a crossing number of up to 19, and in 2025 Morwen B. Thistlethwaite listed the 1,847,319,428 with 20 crossings. On a camp rope with two loose ends, what defines the type is the job it does.

Sources: OEIS A002863, Burton (SoCG 2020) and Thistlethwaite (Algebraic & Geometric Topology, 2025).

🎯How many knots does a Pathfinder need to know?

Far fewer than 3,857. The regular classes each have their own lists, as the guide to Pathfinder knots by class shows, and anyone who wants to go further will find the Knots and Lashings honor requirements. The portal's catalog has 195 items: 67 easy, 94 medium and 34 hard. Master one knot from each main family before moving on to the decorative ones.

At your Unit meeting, try the fact-or-legend challenge: each Pathfinder draws a knot from the catalog and researches where its name comes from, and the Unit votes on whether the story is documented, a theory or a legend.

Common mistakes: trusting the nickname, which changes from region to region, and assuming an old or famous knot is a safe knot. To test a knot, tie it with an adult nearby, compare it with the catalog video, pull with increasing force and untie it to see whether it releases the way it should.