Hi, and welcome once again to our series of Puff Glossaries. If this is your first time stopping by, the Puff Glossaries are an ongoing group of articles dedicated to keeping you up to the minute on the various terms used in the smoking world. So if you want to expand your vocabulary and maybe learn a little more about cigars, click the old Full Story button below and let’s get started.

We have covered a lot of ground in the past with these glossaries, and I am pretty sure I have touched upon just about every cigar term and, more recently, every pipe tobacco term. So with this issue, I would like to take a little different approach to our defining methodology. This time, I want to focus on tobacco specifically, and the many different ways that people incorporate it around the world.

Most people think of tobacco in a very limited way. Cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco. Those more familiar with smoking might think about snuff, chewing tobacco, maybe even water pipes. But those are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tobacco. In this article I want to share with you the definitions of some of the more bizarre (and common as well) ways to use tobacco, some of which I have tried, and some that I will never try.

As always, if you have experimented with any of the methods or products herein, or know some that I missed, drop us a line – we always like to hear what you are thinking.

For simplicity’s sake, I will use an alphabetical listing style. Let’s begin.

Beedi

I have never heard this form of tobacco, pronounced the way it looks, spoken aloud by any smoker before, which comes as a surprise in some ways, because it just so happens to be one of the most popular forms of tobacco product in India – more so than cigarettes, to which it bears a resemblance.

Beedi are known as the poor man’s cigarette due to its cheap price (and construction) and this is probably the reason for its popularity in the poorer South Asian countries where economic slumps are common. It basically consists of tobacco wrapped in a tendu leaf, which is then threaded closed.

I have never tried a Beedi and likely never will for a number of reasons. First, they are made primarily by women in questionable working conditions, second, I doubt the quality is very good, and lastly, they are worse for you than cigarettes, and let’s face it, you never know what else is going into them.