OMGWTF The origin stories of our favourite internet acronyms
HAVE you ever thought about where now-ubiquitous semi-words like “OMG” and “LOL” come from?
Sure, they’ve been sanctified by the Oxford English Dictionary as totally legitimate, but it’s often difficult to figure out how, exactly, they began.
Even web historians – some of whom get paid to study this stuff, people – occasionally dispute these well-known words’ origins.
We decided to take a stab at figuring out the stories behind the “WTFs” and “YOLOs” of the internet world. LOL Meaning: laughing out loud.
The online use of LOL might date as far back as the early 1980s 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.
“I always emphasised (and still do) it was meant to be used only if you truly laughed out loud,” Pearson wrote in a post crowning himself the inventor of LOL. LMAO Meaning: laughing my ass off.
By 1989, the acronym LMTO or “laughing my tush off” was already around, according to FidoNews.
A year later, its more crass counterpart was supposedly coined, appropriately enough, during an online game of Dungeons & Dragons.
Even before the internet, misanthropic youth liked to talk about “laughing their asses off ”. In J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the novel’s main character, Holden Caulfield, described a movie he saw like this: “It ends up with everybody at this long dinner table laughing their asses off because the great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies.” ROFL Meaning: rolling on the floor laughing.
ROFL and its variants, including ROTFL (the “T” is for “the”) and ROTF (which does away with “laughing” altogether), date back to at least 1989, when it was apparently first used in a post on Usenet, an early internet message board, in a group discussing amateur radio. Someone nicknamed “Chuq” apparently ROFLd when another person didn’t know what RTFM or “read the f*****g manual,” meant.
ROTFLOL, which combines “rolling on the floor” with “laughing out loud,” is nearly as old and was first used in a 1992 post to the alternative rock forum on Usenet. WTF Meaning: “what the f***?” In a post on the blog Language Log, language historian Ben Zimmer says he found the earliest instance of WTF in a 1985 Usenet post titled “Ramblings.”
“Upon booting I received a message saying “PLEASE INSERT WORD MASTER,” a user named Jay Fields wrote. “I asked myself, ‘WTF?’ “ YOLO Meaning: you only live once.
Sorry, but you can’t pin YOLO on Drake. The Canadian rapper may have popularised the acronym in his song The Motto, but the phrase has been in use since at least the 18th century, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used an expression translating to “one lives but once in the world” in the play Clavigo. Johann Strauss II also titled a waltz Man lebt nur einmal! (You only live once!) in 1855.
In the mid-1980s, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart named his California ranch YOLO, also after the motto, as told to Vanity Fair.
Even the acronym’s modern exposure dates back further than Drake to at least 2004, when Adam Mesh, a former contestant on the reality show Average Joe, printed the phrase on a line of T-shirts.
In November 2012, the Oxford American Dictionaries included YOLO in its shortlist for the 2012 English Word of the Year. It lost to another acronym, GIF (graphics interchange format). OMG Meaning: oh my God. This acronym goes way back to 1917, when 75-year-old John Arbuthnot Fisher, First Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, sent a letter to Winston Churchill that concluded, “I hear that a new order of knighthood is on the tapis – OMG (Oh My God) – shower it on the admiralty” (Meaning: knight me, please).
In other words, even a century ago, OMG was used to say things like, “OMG I want.”
OMG’s online use dates to at least 1994. The Oxford English Dictionary traced it to a post on a Usenet forum about TV soap operas that reads, “OMG! What did I say?” – HuffPost Tech