lol
acronym / tone particle · 1980s BBS → forever
also seen as: lmao, lolol, LOL
the short answer
'Laughing out loud' — which stopped meaning laughter decades ago and became the internet's most important tone-softener.
WHAT IT MEANS
Lol officially means “laughing out loud,” and has not reliably meant that in decades. Its actual modern job is tone-softening: appended to messages to signal lightness, defuse potential offense, or cushion a sentence that might otherwise land too hard (“that's due today lol”). Nobody typing lol is necessarily laughing; everybody reading it understands the true payload — “this message is friendly.”
Actual laughter now requires escalation — “LOL,” “lmaooo,” “I'm crying,” or the skull emoji — because lol's face value inflated away years ago. This makes it one of linguistics' favorite specimens: an acronym that completed a full journey from literal description to pure grammatical particle, doing for text what tone of voice does for speech.
WHERE IT CAME FROM
Lol was born on the pre-web internet — usually credited to 1980s bulletin-board chat, with one Canadian BBS user's account widely cited as the coinage story — and spread through Usenet and IRC as part of the first generation of chat acronyms (brb, afk, rofl).
The AIM and texting era of the 2000s made it universal, and somewhere in that decade the semantic drift completed: lol detached from laughter and became punctuation. Linguists have since written serious papers on it, dictionaries added it (Oxford in 2011), and today it may be the single most-typed piece of slang in human history — a genuine contender for the most successful word the internet ever produced.
HOW TO USE IT
“ok heading home lol” — no joke present, none needed
Correct — pure tone-softener. The sentence is now friendly. Mission accomplished.
“LMAOOO” — in response to something actually funny
Correct — real laughter requires the escalated forms. Lol itself retired from comedy.
“We regret to inform you lol” — the two registers colliding
Incorrect — some sentences cannot be softened. Choose a lane.
Ending a mildly risky opinion with lol as a legal disclaimer.
Advanced — the liability shield. 'It's just a joke' in three lowercase letters.
VIBE CHECK: IS IT STILL COOL?
Certified — arguably the most successful piece of internet language ever shipped: forty years old, typed billions of times daily, and so essential that texts without it read as cold. It will outlive every entry in this dictionary, and possibly the dictionary format itself. lol.
Status: ✅ CERTIFIED — established, safe to use. Last reviewed August 2026.
words that travel in the same pack
PUT IT ON A MEME
Knowing the word is step one. Step two is the meme lab — caption it, export it, send it. Or go back to the dictionary and keep studying. The vocabulary test is your entire future online.