Switch It Up And Try These Synonyms For “LOL”?

LOL and beyond

We can chuckle and chortle. We can snicker and snort. We can cackle, cachinnate, and crack up. We can even guffaw. There are many words to express laughter—and these are just in English.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that there are plenty of ways to show when you’re in stitches on social and in text messages as well. Of course, LOL (or lol) is the classic way to express laughter online. The acronym, standing for laughing out loud, dates back to online message boards in the 1980s. Given its age, however, LOL has since inspired many offshoots.

From internet acronyms like ROTFLOL to the number 555, unique ways to “laugh” using text have always added a little fun to our communications. How many of these LOL synonyms do you recognize?

lulz and lel

One synonym for LOL is lulz, which is based on a colloquial pronunciation and informal spelling of the plural form of LOL. Lulz usually refers to laughter that comes at someone else’s expense.

Then there’s lel, another playful or ironic version of LOL associated with trollish behavior online. It emerged on the popular image-board site 4chan in the mid-2000s, with its E apparently a random substitute for the O in LOL.

Be careful: in some internet contexts, lel developed a darker side, with some users pairing lel with a Trollface image, a meme based on a rage comics character used by some troublemakers online. (Some might even consider lel a dank meme, a meta-meme which parodies conventional internet humor.)

😂 and 🤣

In the mid-2010s, emoji took over, including two popular emoji depicting laughter: Face with Tears of Joy 😂 and Rolling on the Floor Laughing 🤣. Face with Tears of Joy 😂 is consistently one of the most popular emoji across the globe, used for expressing varying degrees of amusement and happiness. People may add the Rolling on the Floor Laughing 🤣 when something is beyond funny and downright hilarious. Both are perfect for use on their own or combined to express laughter online and in text messages.

Speaking of rolling on the floor laughing …

ROFL and roflcopter

The Rolling on the Floor Laughing emoji 🤣 is in part inspired by ROFL—an acronym meaning rolling on the floor laughing, of course.

Sometimes pronounced to rhyme with awful, ROFL is found as early as 1989. By the 1990s it became the ultimate combo: ROFL was combined with LOL in ROTFLOL.

Another play on ROFL is the roflcopter, a blend of helicopter and ROFL. The term was allegedly coined in 2003 by moderators on a World of Warcraft III forum in reference to a vehicle in that online game, the gyrocopter. Gamers may use roflcopter as a response to something they find extremely funny in allusion to the meme and as an intensification of ROFL. (Dude, roflcopter, that was hilarious!)

Other variants of ROFL include ROTF (just rolling on the floor) and ROTFL, which includes the initial for the. The possibilities are endless … try one out!

XD or xD

We’re going early internet for this synonym. Before emoji, many people used emoticons (remember those?) like XD or xD to convey laughter. XD/xD are supposed to resemble someone’s eyes scrunched closed and mouth opened wide in laughter. Their exact origin is unknown, but they likely emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s. An Urban Dictionary entry for XD/xD dates them to 2003, while noting they are “better than lol.” That year, others also began to use a phonetic rendering of XD, ecks dee, as a play on the emoticon.

As emoji have become more popular and widespread, XD has dropped in use, though it’s still found online. In some situations, it may be the easiest way to communicate laughter. (But feel free to also use it for old times’ sake!)

kek

Not all synonyms for LOL are funny. Used originally by gamers, Kek is an online term with a similar meaning to LOL or haha, but it has taken a controversial turn.

The expression kek in the context of gaming originated from Blizzard’s 1998 real-time strategy game Starcraft. The game did not support the Korean writing system, so the Korean equivalent to the English hahaha, or ㅋㅋㅋ, became written as “kekeke,” and soon became an in-joke to gamers.

As it turns out, Kek is also the name of an ancient Egyptian deity often represented as a humanoid figure with the head of a frog. In 2015, an anonymous user on 4chan posted information and pictures of Kek, with users comparing the god to Pepe the Frog, an innocent cartoon character that has, since the 2016 US presidential election, been turned into a hate symbol by the alt-right supporters of Donald Trump. By 2016, Pepe, Trump, and Kek had become linked.

Due to the alt-right’s hijacking of the term, kek has become linked to the alt-right movement’s ties to white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and other hateful ideologies. This development has been much to the dismay of gamers who enjoyed using kek as an expression of laughter.

Our next Asian-language-inspired form of laughter, however, remains squeaky-clean.

wwww

All around the world, LOL has some unique synonyms. Wwww (pronounced “wah-rah-wah-rah-wah-rah-wah-rah”) is the Japanese equivalent of the English hahahaha, used to express laughter online and in text messages.

The use of wwww to represent laughing comes from the Japanese wara (笑), “to laugh.” With the rise of text-messaging and the internet in the 1990s–2000s, Japanese users adapted the kanji 笑 to denote laughter (similar to LOL). People eventually found it easier, though, to use the letter w, from the romaji of 笑, wara.

Like hahahaha or lolololol, Japanese users string together multiple Ws to intensify the intended emotion. Someone noticed that all those Ws looked like blades of grass, prompting people to refer to wwww as kusa (草), Japanese for “grass.” Also like a curt haha or lol, a shortened w(ww) can have an ironic tone or even mocking subtext (e.g., Haha, real funny. Not.)

Some speakers of Asian languages forgo the Latin alphabet altogether to express laughter  …

233 and 555

Some Chinese speakers use the number 233 as shorthand for laughter. This comes from the popular Chinese online forum Mop.com, which has custom, emoji-like characters. On Mop, the 233rd character is a GIF of a small, furry creature pounding the ground in laughter. As a result, 233 spread as shorthand for laughter.

Like other forms of online laughter, the longer the string of numbers, the more enthusiastic the laughing. So, if 233 means “haha,” then 2333333333 is more like “hahahahahaha.”

Thai speakers also use numbers to express laughter, but this use is more onomatopoeic than the Chinese example above. The word for the number 5 (๕) in Thai is ha (ห้า). So, Thai users will often write 555 in Arabic numerals for a hahaha or LOL.

Speaking of onomatopoeic ways to express laughter online …

jaja and jeje

In Spanish, J is usually pronounced with a strong H sound. For example, the Spanish word mija is pronounced [mee-hah], not [mee-jah].

That’s why many Spanish speakers often will write haha as jaja. Just like when English-speakers write long strings like hahahahaha to express lots of laughter, Spanish speakers will string together JAs depending on how funny something is.

Spanish speakers will also use jejeje to express (often more mischievous or trollish) laughter, like the English hehehe.