It's our best-loved abbreviation, lol! According to a recent poll, 54% of us regularly use "lol" to express laughter in our emails and texts. The online slang term, short for "laughing out loud", is now so widely used that in March it was recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary. Not all of us, however, are lol-ing from the same hymn sheet.
Just ask the creator of this Facebook page: "My mum thinks 'lol' means 'Lots of Love'. She texted me: 'Our dog died LOL'" She clearly wasn't alone: 51,854 people "like" this.
Others just don't have a clue what it means. It doesn't help that when you ask online, the most likely response is "LOL". Or a derogatory cry of "Noob!" Or "Let's Order Linguini", as one bemused texter was informed by a particularly facetious forum dweller.
Here are six other things it definitely doesn't mean, but could:
▶ Looting Own Laptop Young middle class Twitter refrain, circa August riots.
▶ Loving Our Loucheness Expression of affection between disreputable characters.
▶ Lonely Old Lumberjack Online dating shorthand.
▶ Lads On Law Barristers' drinking chant.
▶ Lost Outside London City dweller's distress call.
▶ Let's Outsource (to) Libya Intelligence services shorthand. Meaning unknown.
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