There are five main types of tricks. They are Flat ground, aerials, flip tricks, grinds, and lip tricks.

Flat Ground

Flay ground tricks involve balancing on one or two wheels, the tail, or the edges. Various Ways to flip the board in and out of these stances were invented in the earliest years of skateboarding. Some flat ground tricks are the pogo, manual, anti casper, wallie, Tv stand, skitch saran wrap, power slide, ollie, and more.

Aerials

Aerials are where the rider seems to ride the board through the air, either through grabbing it with a hand to hold it on his or her feet or by keeping constant and careful pressure on the board with the feet to keep it from floating away. This class of tricks started with Tony Alva doing a frontside Air in an empty swimming pool in the late 1970s and has expanded to include the bulk of skateboarding tricks to this day, including the Ollie and all of its variations.

Flip Tricks

Flip tricks (skateboarding) are a subset of aerials which are all based on the Ollie. The first such trick was the Kickflip. You can spin the board around many different axis, and even combine several rotations in to one trick. These tricks are arguably most popular among street skateboarding purists, although skaters with other styles perform them as well.

Grinds

Slides and grinds involve getting the board up on some type of edge, rail, or coping and sliding or grinding along the trucks or board.When it is primarily the board which is contacting the edge, it's called a slide; when it's the truck, it is a grind. Grinding and sliding skateboards started with sliding the board on parking blocks and curbs, then extended to using the coping on swimming pools, then stairway handrails, and has now been expanded to include almost every possible type of edge.

Lip Tricks

Finally, lip tricks are done on the coping of a pool or skateboard ramp. Most grinds can be done on the coping of a ramp or pool as well, but there are some coping tricks which require the momentum and vertical attitude that can only be attained on a transitioned riding surface. These include Inverts and their variations as well as some dedicated air-to-lip combinations.

Skateboarding has its own vernacular and slang. Most of the names of standard tricks were made up by the person that invented them, and to some extent they reflect what the person was thinking about the trick at the time. The names range from descriptive (kickflip) to silly (Ho-Ho plant) to intentionally provocative (shove-it). The earliest tricks were often named after the person that invented them (Andrecht after Dave Andrecht; Elguerial after Eddie Elguera). The origins of some trick names are obscure, either because the inventor didn't name the trick or intentionally gave it a random or obtuse meaning based on an inside joke that was never shared. Some tricks have more than one name, likely because several people independently invented the same trick around the same time and gave it different names, or because the original name was lost.