Netspeak For Newbies 101

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another page of "DWL answers your requests". I realize obscenely long hiatuses really screw with my chance to obtain fans, but I still prefer my reality over the virtual world.

Today, someone asked for a definitive list of internet short-hand/speak. Things like LOL, LMAO, and ROFL, among others. And others there are; many, lots, and even more. Now, don't let this intimidate you if you're new to instant messaging or chatrooms, there's a simple formula you can use to begin deciphering these mysterious new words, words nobody learned back in elementary school, at least, not in my generation.

All you have to know to begin is, any of these words are just abbreviations of a longer phrase that people often say(at least online they do, maybe not so much in reality), but are too cumbersome to repeatedly type out. They will usually be the first letter of each word in the phrase, and one word is meant to represent one phrase.

Let's take one of the most common - LOL. It stands for Laugh Out Loud. One would say/type this in a chatroom or message to denote that whatever they just read/heard/viewed/or even happened on their end of the computer, was funny enough to make them laugh aloud or chuckle audibly.

So now you know the formula behind these words, you can begin decoding them yourself, I have provided a few "translations" to get your started:

LMAO - Laughing My Ass Off

ROFL - Rolling On Floor Laughing

LAWL - Laugh A Whole Lot

I will not be listing every single one of these ever invented, I never will be able to. This hub would be 50,000 rows long. I don't know every single one. New ones come up all the time. People vary these words and their usages. They could mean different things to different people. Even the reasons are endless. For further reading and an up-to-today list of these phrases, you could try www.urbandictionary.com, or www.thefreedictionary.com, and even wikipedia.org(are they a competitor to hubpages? I hope I didn't just plug a rival. Shouldn't be, we're both free resources). Those dictionary sites will give you more abbreviations than you could use in a lifetime. Well, more than you could use in a year anyway.

There are two subcategories on this subject, or two I consider subcategories - l33t(Leet), and internet slang(pwned, noob). Leet is a way of typing where you replace the characters in a word with similar looking symbols on the keyboard, or even the character map. Originally developed by hackers to communicate in secret, today it is also used by internet esoterics. Leet, in fact, stands for "Elite".

For example, I could depict the word "Leet" the way I did above, with the 3's replacing the E's, or even 133+(one-three-three-plus sign). Leet is even more variable than internet speak, in that almost every user of Leet has their own version. I use Leet for depicting words I wouldn't otherwise put in this hub, like $#!+ (S-H-I-you get the idea), or even @$$, although that word's become more accepted. It means donkey people, what were you thinking?

Internet slang is something slightly different from internet speak. While speak is the normal words to use in everyday communication(online anyway), slang is what's used "on the street". In the virtual world, one of these "streets" is the video gaming community. We(yea I'm a part of that world) might not be threatening in real life(and there's nothing wrong with that), but in-game we sell illicit substances and get together to kill things. Words like "pwned" and "noob" are heard as often as "muthaf-cka" and "bi-o-tch"(spelled that way too) in a bad neighborhood.

While internet slang are still abbreviations, they are abbreviations of a single word rather than an entire phrase. Sometimes they come from repeated typos when anyone tries to go for the word, other times they're started by one person, and like a bad high-school fad, everyone copies. Regardless, to decipher internet slang requires a little knowledge of what the other person is talking about, and sometimes looking at the placement of the letters on your keyboard.

For fun, "Pwned" stands for "Owned", pronounced "po-ned". Originally, people would yell "Owned" at their opponents when they totally slaughtered them without retaliation, but since the "O" and the "P" on the keyboard are right next to each other, "pwned" came up as often as "owned" and became a newer, fresher, and funnier way to rile your opponent. Similarly, that's how "pron" became a stand-in for "porn". "Noob" stands for newb, an abbreviation for "newbie", "new guy", or "rookie".