Bold black text reading LOL with Laugh-Out-Loud in parentheses on white background

LOL

1989catchphraseclassic

Published September 5, 2026

LOL, short for "laugh out loud," went from a niche BBS abbreviation in the late 1980s to one of the most-used pieces of internet slang in the world. What began as Canadian chatroom shorthand later got added to the Oxford English Dictionary and mutated into a whole family of laughter acronyms, from ROFL and LMAO to lulz and kek.

internet slang origin memes early internet memes slang memes forum era memes word of the year memes

Overview

The strict original meaning was literal: someone typed LOL only when they actually laughed at their screen2. By the 2010s that reading was mostly gone. People type "lol" reflexively at the end of messages that aren't funny at all, closer to a punctuation mark or tone softener than a laughter cue1. Urban Dictionary bluntly summed up the shift by defining LOL as "this text briefly indicates I am not being hostile"3.

The acronym also spawned a family of variants. ROFL ("rolling on floor laughing") and LMAO followed as escalations, while lulz, lawl, and kek picked up ironic or subcultural meanings, with kek in particular starting as a World of Warcraft rendering of "lol" that later spread on 4chan4. LOL got verbed too, showing up as "lol'd," "LOLed," and "lolling"4. Older readers sometimes still parse the letters as "lots of love," which produced a running joke about parents accidentally sending LOL in condolence messages3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Viewline BBS (coined) / FidoNews and GEnie (spread)
Creator
Wayne Pearson
Date
1989

The letters "LOL" predate the internet as a letter-writing shorthand for "lots of luck" or "lots of love"4. The modern "laugh out loud" reading traces back to a Canadian BBS called Viewline, where user Wayne Pearson says he coined it in the mid-1980s after a friend's joke on the chat made him actually laugh out loud alone in his room. Pearson admits he never saved the original log, so his claim is unverified2.

The earliest confirmed printed appearance of LOL meaning "laugh out loud" is May 8th, 1989, on Page 10 of a FidoNews Newsletter that listed it in a glossary of online acronyms4.

How It Spread

From Viewline the abbreviation jumped to GEnie, one of the big commercial online services of the era alongside CompuServe and Prodigy. Pearson and other Viewline users say they carried their jargon into GEnie's chatroom regulars, where LOL took off, and GEnie users then coined ROFL as an extension2. From there it moved through Usenet and other BBSes over the following decade.

The Oxford English Dictionary formally added LOL to its listings on March 25th, 2011, alongside OMG and FYI4. Actual usage started sliding as emoji took over. A Facebook internal study published by Trak.in in December 2016 found that "haha" was the most typed laugh marker on the platform, emoji second, and "lol" the least of the four options tested4.

In April 2019, Mashable writer Nicole Gallucci wrote about her own "auto-lol" habit of ending unfunny messages with "lol," and asked linguists why the acronym had drifted into a tone marker roughly meaning "I'm not being hostile"1.

How to Use This Meme

"lol" is typically dropped at the end of a message, lowercase, to soften the tone or signal the sender isn't being serious. It often carries no actual laughter behind it1. Uppercase "LOL" still shows up but usually reads as more emphatic or performative. For heavier laughter people commonly reach for ROFL, LMAO, or the ironic kek instead4.

Frequently Asked Questions