It began as a shorthand understood only by computer geeks and went on to enter the dictionary and be (mis)used by the prime minister. But LOL, the acronym for “laugh out loud” used to express an electronic laugh, has had its day, according to a Facebook survey.
As parents and grandparents have taken up “lolling” and “lolzing”, the young have abandoned it in favour of the heartier “haha” and “hehe”, or use emoji to express amusement in text.
In the report, entitled the Not-so-Universal Language of Laughter, Facebook drew on results from an audit of posts in the US during one week in May.
“Like a dialect, e-laughing is evolving. The most common laugh is haha, followed by various emoji and hehe. Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes,” the report said. “People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas.”
Most popular was haha, used by 51.4% of users, followed by emoji at 33.7%, then hehe at 13.1%.
LOL, or lol, depending on whether users write it as initials or a word, was used by a mere 1.9%, with an average age of 28.
But its demise was on the cards. The first nail in its coffin was when it gained legitimacy in the lexicon by being included in the 2011 Oxford English Dictionary, to the dismay of purists. Its entry read: “Informal. Laughing out loud, laugh out loud (used chiefly in electronic communication to draw attention to a joke of amusing statement, or to express amusement.”
Despite criticism at the time, the OED had in fact been tardy in deciding to include it. Its first recognised use was in May 1989 in a newsletter for the International FidoNet Association, a worldwide computer network for bulletin boards, and it popped up again among early users of the internet on a Usenet newsgroup in 1993. Geek speak became street speak, and then became common parlance.
LOL was to suffer an even worse blow in 2012, when it emerged that David Cameron had taken to tapping it into his smartphone – albeit in the mistaken belief it stood for “lots of love”.
He often signed off his text messages to neighbour Rebekah Brooks with LOL, Brookes revealed to the Leveson inquiry, “until I told him it meant laugh out loud, and then he didn’t sign them like that any more”.
Facebook’s study was conducted in response to a New Yorker article on the subject of e-laughter. The study foundthat the average number of letters making up an e-laugh was four. But six letters – as immortalised in David Bowie’s best-forgotten 1960s hit The Laughing Gnome – was also common, with those really, really amused expressing ‘hahaha’ and ‘hehehe’.
