Types of Hooks: The Ten Fishing Hook Styles and What Each One Is For

There are ten types of fishing hooks worth knowing, and each is a shape with a job: the J hook for bait, the circle hook for bait you do not strike, the worm hook for Texas-rigged plastics. The seven others are the octopus hook, Aberdeen, Kahle, siwash, jig, drop-shot and treble. Every hook has the same parts, and the types differ only in how those parts are bent. Learn the shapes, and a wall of hooks in a tackle shop reads like a menu.

The oldest English word for a fishing hook is angle, from the Old English angol. Angling is named after the hook, not the fish.

What are the ten types of fishing hooks?

Five types are bait hooks, chosen for how a fish takes a worm, a minnow or a chunk of cut bait. The drawings put the shapes side by side, with the part that tells each one apart in blue.

The other five ride on lures and soft plastics: the siwash, the worm hook, the jig hook, the drop-shot hook and the treble.

The table is how you tell them apart on the rack, and what each one is for.

Two of these come built into the lure. The jig hook is molded into a lead or tungsten head, as the jigs pages show, and the treble hangs from crankbaits and topwaters. Between the single hook and the treble sits the double hook: one eye, two shanks and two points. It is the hook that rides upturned against the back of a hollow-body frog.

Sizes are a separate decision from type, and they are not standardized between makers. The hook size chart page measures why a 2/0 octopus and a 2/0 circle hook are not the same hook.

Which hook do you need?

1. Bait or lure? A lure comes with its hooks; the choice is whether to change them, and the treble hook page covers that. Bait fishing is where the type is chosen.
2. Will the fish swallow it? Catfish, stripers and reef fish take a bait down. A circle hook, fished by reeling rather than striking, keeps the hook in the corner of the mouth. Maine’s regulators put it in one sentence: point the rod at the fish and reel, and the hook sets itself.
3. Is the bait small and soft? A minnow, a leech or a piece of worm goes on an octopus or a small bait hook, which hides in the bait and does not kill it. A light-wire Aberdeen does the same: less puncture, so the minnow swims longer.
4. Is the cover snaggy? An Aberdeen’s light wire straightens on a snag and is bent back with pliers, so the panfish angler in flooded timber loses fewer rigs.
5. Is it a soft plastic? A worm hook, EWG for bulk, rigged Texas style with the point buried so it comes through cover weedless; pick the wire from the table below.
6. Does the regulation say single hook? A siwash in place of a treble on a spoon or plug, or an inline single on a crankbait. The open eye closes onto the split ring with pliers. Catch-and-release anglers often make the same swap by choice, because trebles do more damage to a fish.
7. Does it say barbless? Any of the ten can be one of the barbless hooks: bought without a barb, or with the barb pinched flat.

Then the size, which changes with the type. A 3/0 EWG hook holds a 6 in (15 cm) worm. A 3/0 Aberdeen holds a large minnow, and a 3/0 circle hook is a channel catfish hook. For catfish, the bait decides what size hook for catfish, and those hooks get tied into catfish rigs. For trout, the hook size for trout changes with the bait, the lure and the fly.

Free PDF · Hook size chart What size is that hook? Lay it on the chart.

Print the free chart, lay any hook on it and read its size: 14 hooks from 9/0 to #8 at actual size, a gap ladder from #32 to 12/0, and the size for 17 fish and 16 baits on the back.

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Which worm hook, and which wire?

The worm hook is the one type that splits again, because a bass angler rigs a 4 in (10 cm) finesse worm one week and a fist-sized creature bait the next. Gamakatsu, whose EWG is its best-selling worm hook, names four shapes.

• Straight shank. Small barbs below the eye hold the plastic, and the newer flipping models add keepers on the shank; Gamakatsu’s standard one has the O’Shaughnessy bend. It suits long, narrow worms and is the flipping and punching hook.
• Offset shank, round bend. A Z-bend under the eye pins the plastic, and the hook stays streamlined through cover. A 3/0 fits a 7 in (18 cm) worm, a 5/0 a 10 in (25 cm) one.
• Extra wide gap. The shank bows out, so a bulky bait can collapse on the hookset and still leave bite room. It is the hook for craws, creature baits and swimbaits.
• Hybrid. An offset shank with an extra-wide gap and an acute angle that keeps the bait straight. Gamakatsu says it works with skinny and fat plastics alike, from a fluke to a Senko.

The Texas rig page shows the rigging and the hook-to-bait sizes.

Within each shape, the wire is chosen for the line, not for the fish. A hook that is thin for its rod straightens on the set, and the fish swims off with a bent paper clip. A hook that is thick for its line never gets driven past the barb.

Gamakatsu’s Superline series exists for exactly this. Its stronger wire “prevents the hook from bending when an angler is using stronger lines”, which is what 50 lb braided line and a flipping stick ask of a hook.

Wire gauge, finish and point: what changes?

Within a type, four choices remain.

Wire gauge. Light wire penetrates on light tackle and bends on big fish. Heavy wire holds a flipped bass on 65 lb braid and needs a hard hookset. Makers write it as 1X to 4X, one step heavier per X; the hook size chart page measures what a step adds.

Forging. A forged hook has been hammered flat through the bend, which stiffens the wire without thickening it. Eagle Claw’s spec sheets list the point and the shank separately: the 214 Aberdeen has a forged point on an unforged shank. Straight-shank flipping hooks are built from thick-gauge wire so they do not flex on a heavy hookset, in Tackle Warehouse’s description.

Finish. Bronze is cheapest and rusts out of a lost fish. Black nickel, platinum black and black chrome resist corrosion in fresh water; tin and nickel are for salt; red and gold are sold as attractors. Stainless does not rust. That is why the federal reef-fish rules in the Gulf of Mexico require non-stainless circle hooks with natural bait: a hook left in a released fish should rust out.

Point. A needle point is round in section and penetrates easiest. A cutting or knife-edge point is ground with edges and holds in hard mouths. A kirbed or offset point is bent out of line, so it catches on the way out of a bait. Check every point on a thumbnail before the first cast, and touch it up with a file or swap the hook when it skates.

Which hook types are for saltwater fishing?

Most of the ten cross over to salt water, where a few of them do jobs a freshwater angler never sees. The jobs and sizes are the ones Florida Sportsman names, plus the Gulf reef-fish rule.

The O’Shaughnessy is the one hook in the table that is not among the ten. It was built strong, first from cast steel to stiffen the bend, which made it a saltwater favorite; the long-shank version came later. In salt, mind the finish too: tin or nickel, and never stainless where a rule wants the hook to rust out.

The Kahle crosses back the other way. In fresh water a 2/0 or 4/0 Kahle is a shiner hook for largemouth bass, Florida Sportsman notes.

What is a large fishing hook called?

There is no single name: the biggest fishing hooks are sold as big-game, shark or tuna circle hooks, and they are the aught sizes at the top of the scale. Hook sizes run from #32, the smallest, to 20/0, the largest. The 13/0 to 20/0 hooks are circle hooks for halibut, sharks and big-game bait; the fishing hook size chart puts them on the scale.

The big hook on a pole is a gaff, and it never goes on the line. A gaff is a handheld pole with a sharp hook or spike on the end, used to pull in a fish too heavy for the line to lift. A flying gaff, for very large fish, goes further: its head comes off the pole under a heavy pull and stays tied to the boat by a rope or cable.

Which part makes each type?

Every hook carries the same seven parts of a fishing hook: point, barb, bend, shank, eye, gap and throat. The types are those parts bent differently. The gap, the distance from the point across to the shank, goes wide for bulky plastics and narrow for small baits. The shank runs long on baitholders and Aberdeens and short on octopus and circle hooks. The point runs straight, or curves back on a circle hook.

The eye marks a type more often than any other part. Eagle Claw lists nine eye shapes, and three of them name a hook on sight:

• Up eye: sits above the shank and takes a snell knot cleanly; it is the octopus hook’s eye.
• Open eye: left with a gap, so the hook clips straight onto a split ring in place of a treble; it is the siwash’s eye.
• Cross eye: angled 90 degrees to the shank, so the hook fishes vertically; it is the jig hook’s eye.

The others are the plain ringed eye, the down eye, the side eye, the big eye for heavy line, the welded eye, and the “R” ringed eye, a loose ring that lets a bait swing freely.

Why does the packet say Sproat or Kirby?

“Favorite hooks used by anglers”, The Tacoma Times, April 6, 1904. Library of Congress, public domain.

Open a hook catalog and some of the names are not types at all but bends, and they are old. This drawing ran in a Tacoma newspaper in April 1904 and shows what a tackle counter stocked then. Carlisle, Limerick, Sproat, Kirby, Kendal, Pennell and Cincinnati are there, several on “gimps”, the snelled leaders of the day. Most of them are still sold.

• Carlisle is the long-shank minnow hook of the day, the Aberdeen’s near relative.
• Limerick and Sproat are bends, and they still name fly-tying hooks.
• Kirby is Charles Kirby, who opened his hook shop in London’s Harp Alley in 1650 and sold the best hooks on the market for decades. His name survives on the Kirby bend and on the “kirbed” point, bent sideways out of line with the shank: the offset point that makers advertise on their octopus hooks today.
• O’Shaughnessy, a heavy-wire bend from the same era, is the bend on Gamakatsu’s standard straight-shank worm hook. It was first made in Limerick, Ireland, and was once sold as the Limerick hook.
• The gimp snell survives as the snelled hook on a card, tied with the snell knot that an up-eye hook is made for.

The pattern names describe the bend; the type names describe the job. A packet that says “Sproat bend octopus” is telling you both.

A hook is the cheapest part of the rig and the only one that touches the fish. The hooks hub holds the size-by-species chart and the law on circle hooks, and the best bass lures page shows trebles, EWGs and jig hooks in use.

Free PDF · 2 pages

Stop guessing hook sizes. Lay any hook on this page and read it

A jar of loose hooks and no packet in sight. Guess wrong and you find out with a fish on.

The True-Size Hook Chart. Print this at actual size, lay a hook on the outlines, and the one its bend fills is its size. One sheet, front and back, for the tackle box.

• 14 hooks from 9/0 to #8 at true size, each with its gap and length in inches and millimeters
• Smaller than #8 or bigger than 9/0? Measure the gap and read the size off the ladder, #32 to 12/0
• The size for 17 fish and 16 baits, from bluegill (#8 to #12) to tuna (7/0 to 10/0)
• A 2/0 circle that gapes less than a #4: why a 2/0 is not always a 2/0, and the aught rule in two sentences

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Every outline drawn from Mustad's published dimensions; every size from the 25 sources on the page, Maryland DNR and Idaho Fish and Game among them.

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