Who invented laugh out loud

The online use of LOL might date back as far as the early '80s in Calgary, Canada, when then-student Wayne Pearson coined the term with friends on Viewline, a bulletin board system that was a sort of rudimentary chatroom.

Or so he claims. Lexicographer and netspeak historian Ben Zimmer told PCWorld that the first documented mention of LOL comes from a May newsletter called FidoNews -- still distributed by the computer network FidoNet today -- which listed it as a commonly used Web acronym. The newsletter is archived in full at TextFiles. I guess you had to be there. Even before the Internet, misanthropic youth liked to talk about "laughing their asses off.

What is it with this guy? Meaning: "what the fuck? Even the acronym's modern exposure dates back further than Drake to at least , when Adam Mesh, a former contestant on the reality show "Average Joe," printed the phrase on a line of T-shirts.

Disappointed in current use. I have moved on. Dude is crazy. Know Your Meme is an advertising supported site and we noticed that you're using an ad-blocking solution.

Read Edit History. About LOL is an abbreviation for "laugh out loud," "laughing out loud" or sometimes "lots of laughs," used in messages to convey laughter. Origin Pre-Internet The abbreviation "LOL" predates the internet and goes back to letter-writing, where it meant "lots of luck" or "lots of love. A friend of mine who went by Sprout and I believe he still does had said something so funny in the teleconference room that I found myself truly laughing out loud, echoing off the walls of my kitchen.

That's when "LOL" was first used. Crediting himself and one of his friends on a Canadian BBS chatroom called Viewline as the ones who spread its usage as slang through chatrooms and Telnet-based channels, he adds: The use of the phrase LOL spread quickly around Viewline, but it wasn't until a bunch of us got free GEnie accounts that it really became popular.

GEnie, back then, was one of the big online services at the time, similar to Compuserve and Prodigy. It had hundreds of chatrooms, including trivia rooms run by script bots -- quite fancy at the time!

A bunch of us Viewliners found these rooms and, of course, our jargon mixed with the regulars of GEnie. Alas, I don't even recall what was so funny! While I can picture in my mind where I was when it happened, I can't narrow the time down any further. I don't expect you to believe this, really, as so many others don't.

Still, it ought to be written out so there's at least a record of it somewhere on the Internet. Spread LOL spread across the web naturally over the course of three decades through word-of-mouth and continued use.

Usage as a Verb In a manner similar to Fap slang , "LOL" has been transformed into a verb, with its own set of temporal conjugations: Lol as an infinitive, LOLed often reduced to lol'd for preterite and past participle, and Lolling as a present participle examples of use as a verb below. Impact On Meme Culture A number of memes use the acronym "lol" in some aspect of their format as it is easy to work into a phrase to change its initial meaning, and denotes comedy.

Top entries this week. Various Examples. Search Interest. Latest Editorial And News. Related Entries Meme Derp. Meme Wat. Meme Fap. Meme Kek. Meme Cool Story, Bro. And this is what happens with language. It's conceivable it could come back in the future. Image source, Thinkstock. Image source, FidoNet newsletter. Internet slang from a tech network newsletter.

LMTO or what? Image source, OED. So is LOL dead? Related Topics. Facebook Language.