Climbing grades

The UK system is made of two sub-grades, an adjective grade and a technical grade.
The adjective grade describes the overall difficulty of the climb taking into consideration how strenuous the route is, the amount of exposure and the availability of protection. The adjective grades are as follows:

Moderate (M), Very Difficult (VD), Hard Very Difficult HVD), Mild Severe (MS), Severe (S), Hard Severe (HS), Mild Very Severe (MVS), Very Severe (VS), Hard Very Severe (HVS) and Extremely Severe. The Extremely Severe grade is also broken down into 10 further sub grades
from E1 to E10.

The numerical technical grading describes the hardest(crux) move on the climb. If it is a multi pitch route then more than one technical grade will be given, one for each pitch. The technical grades are as follows:

4a, 4b, 4c, 5a, 5b, 5c, 6a, 6b, 6c, 7a, 7b, 7c ..... and onwards
These are combined to give the overall grade for the climb, the table below outlines the usual range of technical grades that you would expect to find combined with the different adjective grades:

Adjective Grade	Technical Grade	Adjective Grade	Technical Grade
M	N/A	E1	5a - 5c
D	N/A	E2	5b - 6a
VD	N/A	E3	5c - 6a
HVD	N/A	E4	6a - 6b
MS	N/A	E5	6a - 6c
S	4a - 4b	E6	6b - 6c
HS	4a - 4c	E7	6c - 7a
MVS	4a -4c	E8	6c - 7a
VS	4a - 4c	E9	7a - 7b
HVS	4c - 5b	E10	7a - 7b