It helps make digital messages feel more polite,” says Kelly.Īs we’ve discussed before, punctuation can be scary. “Lol specifically does a number of emotional jobs outside of its literal meaning that frequently has nothing to do with laughter or hilarity. So what are we trying to communicate when we sign off our text messages with a lol? It’s not because we’re literally laughing out loud rather, we’re using this lowly little acronym to try and soften the tone of our messages. So we have to rely on different things to do that, like emojis and text acronyms. body language, gesturing, facial expressions - gets lost in our texts, emails, Slack messages and tweets.

That’s because lol and lmao have evolved, and are now predominantly used as tone indicators, explains John Kelly, the Associate Director of Content and Education at .Īs we increasingly spend our lives online and communicate largely through digital messages, the paralinguistic functions we use IRL to convey emotion, tone and nuance - i.e.

What lmao means