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''Buddies'' carries too much of a male connotation. So does ''Pals.'' ''Chums'' sounds fishy (in the singular, it's American slang for ''bait''; in the plural, it's too limey). But ''Friends'': Now, there's a deceptively simple, useful word, applicable to both men and women, descriptive of a whole host of relationships, everything from casual acquaintances to lifelong, die-hard amigos.

In 1994, when creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman, working off zeitgeist concepts like Gen-X and yuppies, conceived what is now NBC's longest running, highest-rated sitcom, they weren't envisioning a sitcom about friends among equals.

Originally, they once told Entertainment Weekly, they had wanted Courteney Cox (at the time the show's best-known face by dint of dancing in the dark with Bruce Springsteen in a music video) to play Monica as this Manhattan group's den mother: a smart, slightly cynical young woman who'd keep the others in line and (get this) maybe start a romance with the dumb guy, Joey (Matt LeBlanc), just because it seemed so unlikely.

My oh my, how times have changed. Now, as the show barrels into its eighth and (likely) final season, Monica has...married Matthew Perry's Chandler and long ago established that far from being cynical, she's the most earnest, if neurotically neat-freak, Friend -- and, of course, unless we missed an episode, that romance with Joey has never materialized.

Yet.

That's one of the great things about ''Friends'': It’s such a perfect Rubik’s Cube of a sitcom, you never know which interlocked combination of characters is going to wind up loving, hating, or goofing on each other. The usual hit-sitcom formula introduces its protagonists’ tics and interpersonal relationships and then hews to them tenaciously, lest viewers get confused or put off. (You’d never have, say, Morey Amsterdam’s and Rose Marie’s characters hook up on the old Dick Van Dyke Show - in fact, the universe shudders at the mere thought of it - and no way would Mad About You’s Paul ever give up his desire to be a filmmaker to be, say, an ice cream vendor.)

But on Friends, inter-Friend romances simmer for years and then bubble up, stirred by an artfully arranged inevitability. And the sextet can pull U-turns like Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe going from being a masseuse to a partner in Monica’s catering business without anyone at home snorting “Yeah, like that’s believable!” Ditto Ross (David Schwimmer), Monica’s paleontologist big brother, marrying a woman who decides she’s gay. Ditto Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) and Monica switching apartments with Joey and Chandler. Because the minor miracle of Friends is that with these six people, you never know what’s going to happen next: who’s going to catch their eye (Rachel once feel for Bruce Willis doing a winkingly smarmy version of his bad self, for heaven’s sake), who’s going to succeed in business (well, almost: Wasn’t actor Joey on the verge of superstardom when he was cast as the lead in the TV series Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E.?), or even who’s going to get pregnant (flighty Phoebe has given noble birth to triplets, and as I write, Rachel is preggers, but by whom is the new season’s cliffhanger to be resolved).

With all these personality twists and turns in mind, let’s board the Friend-ship and inspect the crew:

MONICA
With a personality as clenched as her grins, Monica Geller presides over the fab rent-controlled apartment (left to her by her grandmother) from which so many plots unfold. A professional cook, she's had a rocky career, from laboring as a sous-chef to running that catering service with Phoebe to acting as head chef at a joint where the staff all hated her. (On the other hand, her work enabled her to get reacquainted with Tom Selleck's Richard, with whom she had a sweet, if dragged-out, June-November romance.)

Food has determined Monica's character: Over the years, we've learned that she was once grossly overweight, which helps explain her whippet-thin tenseness, if not quite allowing us to forgive the writers their too-easy fat jokes. Her love affair with Chandler has mellowed Monica, but with a season to go, who knows whether that marriage will ripen, or fall as flat as an old soufflé. Either way, Cox Arquette long ago transcended any possible just-a-pretty-face stigma by revealing a knack for slapstick and go-for-broke emotionalism.

ROSS
Ross has a Ph.D. in dinosaur boning. Did it in a natural history museum. Married a lesbian, Carol, who gave birth to his son, Ben. Spent part of the show's first season palling around as much with a monkey (the cheeky Marcel) as he did with Chandler or Joey, but reserves his deepest feelings for Rachel, whom he's loved since high school. They actually did marry, in the last episode of the fifth season, but it was a drunken union that ended in a quickie divorce.

At once hangdog morose and lovably optimistic about his love life, Ross probably had his closest call with Emily (the miscast Helen Baxendale, apparently there to capitalize on ''Friends''' enormous popularity in Britain), a pretty British sourpuss whom he humiliated at a barely standing altar (the old church was half demolished) when he spoke Rachel's name instead of Emily's while reciting his vows. Ross' chief charm is that he's a constant work in progress, a loser with the eternal propensity to become a winner. To convey such opposites while maintaining a baleful deadpan is a measure of Schwimmer's adroitness.

PHOEBE
Given her history, Phoebe Buffay could be the protagonist in a weepy TV movie: Her stepmother committed suicide; her father abandoned her at a young age; she doesn't get along with her witchy twin sister, Ursula. She lived with her grandmother until the old woman died. She conducts a deluded career as a singer-songwriter (signature tune: ''Smelly Cat''), and still lives alone.

But Phoebe is, instead, the most joyous Friend, unabashedly blissful with a zesty ditziness that sometimes rises to Gracie Allen-greatness. A spacey gal with faith in aromatherapy, deep massage, and the virtues of vegetarianism, Phoebe is also sexy (she once memorably turned up the heat to seduce Chandler, just for the hell of it) and maternal (never forget those triplets she birthed). Phoebe could have been a one-note dimwit, but Kudrow, with a steadily developed range of quirky tonal changes and surprising reactions to her costars' lines, became the series' most generous, unpredictable character. Often half-baked, she's nonetheless one smart cookie.

CHANDLER
Wise guy extraordinaire, Chandler Bing is also the man with the least definable job -- a dissatisfied data processor whose workplace scenes are pure tragicomedy. He's certainly the most cutting Friend, expressing sarcasm not just verbally but in beautifully sustained pauses and slow burns. (Perry is a consummate, underrated TV actor in his control of how the camera will record his reactions, and his four-episode arc in Season 4 in which he pined over Joey's girlfriend, Kathy, provided some of the series' most touching moments ever.)

Because of his long periods of datelessness (who wouldn't be girl-shy after his early dalliance with the whinnying ''Oh. My. God'' Janice?), some episodes have had Chandler protesting that he's ''not gay.'' Some have wondered whether roommates Chandler and Joey aren't the original Ambiguously Gay Duo, and while you can build the same case for it in symbolic terms as you can for the encoded homosexual relationship between the Crane brothers on ''Frasier,'' I've come to the conclusion that Chandler, though likely gender-confused by his cross-dressing father, is not a closet case but rather, like a lot of intelligent wisecrackers, simply alienated from himself, uncomfortable in his own skin. Which, until his romance with Monica bloomed, made him the unhappy guy who makes us laugh. Now he's just a very funny guy.

RACHEL
She made a literal opening splash, sloshing into the show's 1994 pilot episode in a wet wedding dress, having left her dentist-intended at the altar. Romantically impetuous, sweetly sentimental, and TV's premier JAP, complicated Rachel went through an obligatory I'll-make-it-on-my-own stint as a (dreadful) waitress at the gang's java clubhouse, Central Perk, and has since gone through a succession of fashion-related jobs, working her way up to Ralph Lauren (the company, not the leathery man himself). The Friend most likely to burst into tears (of joy, of heartache, of the shock of turning 30), Rachel also has the group's healthiest dating life, bedding everyone from the language-impaired-but-beautiful Paolo to office stud-muffin Tag (Eddie Cahill), even as she feels the constant pull of Ross' yearning. Aniston's acting, too often overshadowed by the attention paid to her hairstyle changes, has reflected Rachel's increasing emotional maturity, and who knows what the stylish, madcap gal will be like when it's revealed that Rachel's the one who turned the pregnancy test blue?

JOEY
Blank of stare and slack of jaw, Joey Tribbiani is a classic type of New York actor -- a dumb, gorgeous hustler who thinks it's a breakthrough when he lands a job as Al Pacino's stunt butt. Prone to misunderstanding everyone around him (when Rachel uses the word unisex, Joey says, ''Maybe you need sex, but I had sex a couple days ago''), there's a lovableness about Joey's talentless-horny-dumbbell shtick that, thanks to Matt LeBlanc's endlessly inventive furrowed-brow and vacant-gaze variations, makes you understand why Chandler and the bunch get such a kick out of the big lug. As they age, of all the Friends, Joey remains the most believable as a roommate: An eternal adolescent at heart, he's a frat boy who never graduates.

In the real world, the cast of Friends have proven nearly as tight as their characters, hanging tough together through thorny contract negotiations, being discreet about their individual, mostly awful movie careers and tabloid-news fodder like Perry’s reliance on prescription drugs and Cox’s marriage to the eccentric actor David Arquette. Some interpret entire seasons of the show through prisms like these (The Year They Demanded $100,000 Per Episode; Chandler: The Thin Period; or Monica: The Haggard Newlywed Look).

While Friends’ sweeps and cliff-hanger episodes have often been clogged with guest stars - everyone from Julia Roberts to Jean-Claude Van Damme - the show fares best when the core group is in one of the apartments, or hanging at the Central Perk coffeehouse, where caffeine dispenser Gunther, who nurses an eternal crush on Rachel, once uttered my favorite Friends non sequitur: Joey rushes into the Perk and says breathlessly, “Hey, Gunther, have you seen Chandler?” Gunther looks at him with disdain and murmurs, “I thought you were Chandler.”