Internet slang is the shorthand, spelling play and symbols that people invented to type faster and talk in-group online, and it has been around since 1979, when Usenet users began building their own abbreviations.
This dictionary-style guide sits inside the wider internet culture section and traces where common terms came from, how they spread and what they mean now.
Where internet slang came from
Since 1979, users of communications networks like Usenet created their own shorthand. Typing was slow, connections were billed by the minute, and screens were small, so every saved keystroke counted. Internet slang originated as a way to save keystrokes for users, alongside getting around auto-moderated platforms, according to Wikipedia’s overview of the topic.
That second motive still shapes vocabulary today. When a platform filters a word, users swap letters, add symbols or invent a new spelling, and the substitute often outlives the filter. The pattern is older than most social networks, and the story of how it unfolded is told in more detail on the internet culture history page.
Slang of this kind falls into a few broad families: abbreviations and acronyms, rebuses that use sounds or numbers, keyboard symbols, and, more recently, emoji. Each family solved a different problem, from speed to tone to evasion.
Common acronyms and what they stand for
Acronyms are the most recognisable layer of internet slang. An acronym is a subset of abbreviations formed from the initial components of each word. Examples of common acronyms include “LOL” for “laugh out loud”, “BTW” for “by the way” and “TFW” for “that feeling when”.
| Term | Meaning | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| LOL | Laugh out loud | Reacting to a joke, or softening a message |
| BTW | By the way | Adding a side note |
| TFW | That feeling when | Opening a relatable caption or meme |
| kek | Laughter (from game chat) | Mocking or playful laughter |
Definitions in the table follow Wikipedia’s entries on internet slang and LOL.
The table shows a pattern: the shortest terms tend to carry emotion, not information. A “BTW” saves a few characters, while “TFW” sets up a whole shared scenario in three letters. Readers meet these terms in captions, replies and group chats, where tone is hard to carry in plain text and a short marker does the work that a facial expression would do in person.
Context decides how a term reads. “LOL” at the end of a blunt sentence often softens it, whereas the same letters after a joke signal real amusement. “TFW” almost always introduces a relatable scenario, usually followed by an image or a short description. Learning these small conventions is most of what it takes to read a feed fluently, and the conventions shift faster than any printed glossary can track.
How did LOL get into the dictionary?
LOL is the best-documented example of slang moving from chat rooms to reference books. In the early to mid-1980s, Wayne Pearson was reportedly the first person to have used LOL while responding to a friend’s joke in a pre-World Wide Web digital chat room called Viewline. He said he typed it instead of “hahaha” to symbolise extreme laughter. Although the account is commonly accepted as true, no written record of the conversation has been found, and the exact date of origin is unknown.
Formal recognition came later. On March 24, 2011, LOL, along with other acronyms, was formally recognized in an update of the Oxford English Dictionary. That date matters because it shows how long a term can circulate before lexicographers accept it: roughly three decades separate the reported Viewline story from the dictionary entry.
Usage data from one small corpus also shows how dominant the term was. Out of 2,185 transmissions, there were 90 initialisms in total, and 76 were occurrences of LOL. That is a single dataset, not a measure of all online speech, but it illustrates why LOL became the default example for the whole category.
Leet, pwn and gaming slang
Gaming communities produced the most inventive vocabulary in the field. Leet originated within bulletin board systems (BBS) in the 1980s, where having “elite” status on a BBS allowed a user access to file folders, games, and special chat rooms. Writers then replaced letters with numbers and symbols, so that “elite” became a string of digits and “hacker” became a similar mix of letters and digits.
The habit served two purposes. It marked insiders, since a newcomer could not easily read or reproduce the spelling, and it dodged keyword filters on boards that tried to block certain words. Both motives echo the keystroke-saving and filter-evading roots described earlier, and they explain why leet-style spelling keeps resurfacing in new forms whenever a platform tightens its rules.
Leet orthography includes terms such as n00b, a term for “noob”, the stereotypical newbie. The derived noun “pwnage” followed ordinary English rules, with speakers saying “that was pwnage” rather than “he has pwnage”. The grammar of leet turned out to be consistent enough that Wikipedia documents suffixes such as -age and -ness for it.
Game chat also exported laughter. Kek is a term for laughter that originated in online games, possibly either World of Warcraft or StarCraft, the latter in which Korean players would type “kekeke” as onomatopoeia for laughter. Voice and text servers keep generating new terms of this kind, a theme explored in the guide to discord culture.
Emoji and slang outside English
Emoji are relatively new to internet slang and are much like emoticons in the way that they visually convey messages. The difference is that emoticons create an image using characters from the keyboard, while emoji portray messages in small cartoons. The “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji (😂) is listed beside LOL as a visual stand-in for laughter.
Laughter slang also differs by language. In Japanese, w is used as an abbreviation for laughter, and it is common for multiple w to be chained together. The resulting shape formed from multiple wwwww leads to the usage of 草, meaning “grass” and read as kusa, because of its resemblance to a patch of grass. English “lol” and Japanese “草” solve the same problem, marking tone in plain text, with different raw material.
The same borrowing runs in both directions. Korean StarCraft players supplied “kekeke” to English-language game chat, and Japanese forum culture supplied a visual joke that other languages recognise at a glance. Slang that begins as a regional typing habit can become a global shorthand once a game, a forum or a video clip carries it across a language border, which is why a modern glossary has to list terms by origin and not only by definition.
Frequently asked questions
What does internet slang usually do for writers?
It saves keystrokes and signals tone. Wikipedia notes that internet slang originated as a way to save keystrokes, and that shorthand dates to 1979 on Usenet.
Who invented LOL?
Wayne Pearson is reportedly the first person to have used it, in the early to mid-1980s on a chat service called Viewline. No written record of the conversation has been found, so the claim remains unverified.
When did LOL become an official dictionary word?
The dictionary route came late: LOL was added to the Oxford English Dictionary alongside other acronyms in its March 24, 2011 update.
What does n00b mean?
It is a leet spelling of “noob”, the stereotypical newbie. Leet began on bulletin board systems in the 1980s, where “elite” users earned special access.
