Golf Score to Par and Scoring Terms
Golf Score to Par and Scoring Terms
What a hole’s score is called, in the Rules’ own language and in the birds. The Rules of Golf say “one under fixed target score” and never say “birdie”: the nicknames come from somewhere else, two published histories of them disagree, and this page prints both rather than picking one.
What this hole is called
Score against parThree strokes on a par four, with the British naming chosen
The Rules’ language, the nicknames, and what each is worth
| Score on the hole | How the Rules of Golf put it | The usual name | Stableford points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Four or more under par | no row — the table stops at four under | no settled name | 6 |
| Three under par | Three under fixed target score | albatross, or double eagle in the United States | 5 |
| Two under par | Two under fixed target score | eagle | 4 |
| One under par | One under fixed target score | birdie | 3 |
| Level with par | Fixed target score | par | 2 |
| One over par | One over fixed target score | bogey | 1 |
| Two over par | More than one over fixed target score | double bogey | 0 |
| Three or more over par | More than one over fixed target score | triple bogey and upward | 0 |
Where the words came from, and where the two accounts disagree
| Word | The USGA’s own history | Scottish Golf History |
|---|---|---|
| par | “didn’t gain official recognition until 1911, when the USGA codified a rating standard” | used at Prestwick in 1870, when Mr AH Doleman called the standard of 49 “par” for the Open course |
| bogey | “originally meant what par does today”; American golfers began using it for one over par “well into the 20th century” | Rotherham’s “ground score” at Coventry, named after the music-hall Bogey Man at Great Yarmouth; two statements in the same article about when the meaning changed do not agree with each other |
| birdie | from the slang “bird”, “according to legend” at Atlantic City Country Club — “a bird of a shot” | Ab Smith placed the shot in 1898 or 1899; the club itself dates it to 1903, and Bernard Darwin had the word in print by 1913 |
| eagle | arrived “shortly after” birdie because “the symbol of the U.S. must be even better”; not fully accepted until the 1930s | reached Britain by 1919, presented there as American usage |
| albatross | displaced “double eagle”; “exact derivation appears to have gone undocumented” | “in fact a British term”; first known reference 1929, first press-reported instance a hole-in-one at Durban Country Club in 1931 |
The Rules do not say “birdie”
Golf’s scoring words are so familiar that it is easy to assume they are rules. They are not. Search the Rules of Golf for “birdie” and you will not find it: the one place the Rules describe a hole’s score against a target is the Stableford table in Rule 21.1b, and its language is “One under fixed target score”, “Fixed target score”, “One over fixed target score”. Not a bird in sight. The vocabulary on the right of the table above belongs to golfers rather than to the two bodies that write the Rules, and that is why this page cites histories for it instead of rule numbers.
Par is the exception, in that it does have a published definition — though it comes from the handicapping book rather than the playing one. The Rules of Handicapping define it as “The score that a scratch player would generally be expected to achieve on a hole under normal course and weather conditions”. Note what that does not say: it is not a measure of length, and two par fours on the same course are not claimed to be equally hard. Par is a benchmark for the scratch player, and everything else on this page is measured from it.
Bogey is the word that moved. It was the first standard score anybody kept — Hugh Rotherham of Coventry proposed standardising “the number of shots at each hole that a good golfer should take, which he called the ‘ground score’”, and it acquired its name at Great Yarmouth, where a member said of the imaginary opponent “This player of yours is a regular Bogey man”, after a music-hall song. The USGA’s own history agrees that “Bogey originally meant what par does today”, and that American golfers only later took it to mean one over. So a reader who learned the word in Britain before the war and a reader who learned it in Ohio last year mean different things by it, and both are right about their own time.
The one live disagreement in current usage is three under par. British and international golfers say albatross; American golfers often say double eagle, and the field above lets you pick, because the score is identical either way. The two histories cited here also disagree about which came first and whose word the albatross is, and rather than reconcile them quietly the table above prints both accounts in adjacent columns. Four under par on a single hole has no name because it effectively cannot happen: a hole in one on a par five is three under, and four under would need a par seven.
What the nicknames are worth is a separate question with a published answer. The Stableford points calculator implements Rule 21.1b’s table, where a net birdie is three points and anything worse than a net bogey is nothing, and where the professional tours’ Modified Stableford puts quite different numbers on the same words. For a whole round rather than a hole, the scoring average and strokes-to-par calculator totals the strokes against par; for match play, where a hole is won or lost rather than counted, the match play status page does that arithmetic.
Where this page states a Rule of Golf, the Rule is quoted from the edition effective from January 2023, which The R&A and the USGA write and publish jointly and which carries the line “© 2022 R&A Rules Limited and The United States Golf Association.” The two bodies revise the Rules from time to time and issue Clarifications between editions, which The R&A says are “released quarterly”, so a Rule quoted without its edition will be wrong for somebody eventually: every Rule on this page is printed with its number and that edition. A Committee may also modify how a competition is played through the Terms of the Competition, and several of the Rules quoted here say so themselves.
Frequently asked questions
What is a birdie, an eagle and an albatross?
One, two and three strokes under the par of the hole. None of the three is defined in the Rules of Golf, which describe a hole’s score only as so many under or over the “fixed target score” in the Stableford table at Rule 21.1b. The nicknames are golfers’ English: birdie and eagle are American in origin, and three under is an albatross in British usage and often a double eagle in American.
Why is one over par called a bogey?
Because bogey used to mean what par means now. It was the first standard score in the game, proposed by Hugh Rotherham of Coventry as a “ground score”, and named at Great Yarmouth after a music-hall Bogey Man. The USGA’s own history of the terminology says it “originally meant what par does today” and that American golfers began using it for one over par “well into the 20th century”.
Is par the same as the average score?
No. The Rules of Handicapping define par as “The score that a scratch player would generally be expected to achieve on a hole under normal course and weather conditions” — a benchmark for the best amateurs, not an average of what anybody shoots. Most golfers average well above par, which is the whole reason handicapping exists.
What do you call four under par on one hole?
Nothing settled, and in practice it does not arise: a hole in one on a par five is three under, so four under needs a par seven. The word condor is sometimes used for an ace on a par five, which is three under rather than four. Rule 21.1b’s own table stops at four under the fixed target score.
Does a hole in one count as a birdie?
It counts as whatever the par makes it. One stroke on a par three is a birdie, on a par four an eagle, on a par five an albatross or double eagle. The Rules of Golf give an ace no special status at all — it is simply a hole played in one stroke.
Related calculators
References
- USGA. Rules of Golf, Rule 21 — “Other Forms of Individual Stroke Play and Match Play”, full-rules text at usga.org (read 15 Oct 2026; about 16,000 characters). This page flattens the Rule 21.1b points table into running text, so the point VALUES are readable here where they are not on The R&A’s copy; all seven rows are reproduced in this page’s own table. Rule 21.2 opens “Maximum Score is a form of stroke play where a player’s or side’s score for a hole is capped”; Rule 21.3 opens “Par/Bogey is a form of stroke play that uses scoring as in match play”.
- USGA. Rules of Golf, Players Edition, Rule 21, usga.org (read 15 Oct 2026; about 4,000 characters). An independent second reading of the same table on a different page, with the column headings “Hole Played In” and “Points”. The two USGA pages agree row for row, which is why the values are used. Rule 21.1b’s prose from this page: “Points are awarded to a player for each hole by comparing the player’s score to the fixed target score for the hole, which is par unless the Committee sets a different fixed target score”, and “A player who does not hole out under the Rules for any reason gets zero points for the hole.”
- Gorant J. “Word Play: How Golf Terminology Has Evolved Over the Years.” USGA, 13 January 2026, usga.org (read 15 Oct 2026; about 13,000 characters). The source for this page’s quotations on par, bogey, birdie, eagle and the albatross, including that par “didn’t gain official recognition until 1911, when the USGA codified a rating standard”, that bogey “originally meant what par does today”, and that the albatross’s “exact derivation appears to have gone undocumented”. The article does not mention the condor and does not discuss the double bogey.
- Scottish Golf History. “Bogey to Blow-Up — origin of golf terms”, scottishgolfhistory.org (read 15 Oct 2026; about 6,000 characters). A second, independent account that disagrees with the USGA’s in three places, and the disagreements are printed on this page rather than reconciled. It dates “par” to 1870 at Prestwick, where “Mr AH Doleman” called the standard of 49 “par” after advice from David Strath and James Anderson, against the USGA’s 1911. It makes the albatross “in fact a British term”, first known reference 1929 and first press-reported instance a hole-in-one at Durban Country Club in 1931, against the USGA’s undocumented derivation. And it gives Ab Smith’s birdie as 1898 or 1899 while “The Country Club in Atlantic City” dates the event to 1903 — so both circulating dates are inside the one source. Its own two statements about when bogey changed meaning do not agree with each other, which is recorded here rather than resolved.
- USGA and The R&A. Rules of Handicapping, 2024 Edition — title page “Effective January 2024” and “© 2023 The United States Golf Association and R&A Rules Limited. All Rights Reserved.” Read 15 Oct 2026 from two independent copies of the full rulebook, a national association’s republication and a separate copy of the official PDF whose extracted text runs to 115,376 characters; both carry Rule 1.2’s prohibition in the same words as The R&A’s website, which is three independent readings of it in all. Source for the definitions of Par, Course Rating, Slope Rating and Handicap Index quoted on this site, including the one that explains 113; for Rule 5.2b’s “Average the lowest 8 of the most recent 20 Score Differentials”, rounded to the nearest tenth, with a soft cap above 3.0 over the Low Handicap Index and a hard cap above 5.0; and for Rule 3.1b’s maximum hole score, which caps a hole at “Par of the hole + 2 strokes + Any handicap stroke(s) that the player receives on that hole” and defines a net double bogey as “the lowest score on a hole for which the player would achieve zero Stableford points”. No formula from this book is reproduced anywhere on this site.
- PGA Tour. “How it works: Modified Stableford format at the Barracuda Championship”, pgatour.com (read 15 Oct 2026; roughly 20,000 to 25,000 characters, most of it navigation and leaderboard). The tour’s own point values, which are not the Rules of Golf’s, are reproduced in this page’s second table: “Double Eagle: 8 points”, “Eagle: 5 points”, “Birdie: 2 points”, “Par: 0 points”, “Bogey: -1 point”, “Double Bogey or more: -3 points”. The page contrasts the format with ordinary stroke play rather than with Stableford — “the objective in a Modified Stableford tournament is to have the highest score” — and does not mention the Rules of Golf table at all.
- The R&A and the United States Golf Association. Rules of Golf, edition effective January 2023. The R&A’s “About the Rules of Golf” page states the edition is “effective from January 2023 for golfers worldwide” and that Clarifications “will continue to be released quarterly on the R&A and USGA websites” (randa.org, read 15 Oct 2026). A copy of the rulebook PDF was read the same day — front matter “Effective January 2023” and “© 2022 R&A Rules Limited and The United States Golf Association. All rights reserved.”; about 113,500 characters of extracted text, truncated after Rule 8, so Rule 21 was not readable in that copy. Checked specifically for an authorization or licensing clause of the kind the Rules of Handicapping carries: the front matter has none, and the only rights language is the copyright notice.