Lol is increasingly used for more than “laughing out loud.” According to McCulloch, it can soften confrontation, request sympathy, or add subtle layers of meaning. You might find it unfair to compare lol to “real” laughter, but as Mculloch points out, in some ways, lol hasn’t changed its meaning so very far from its roots in laughter. Sure, sometimes we laugh at a direct joke, something we can point at and say, ‘That’s funny.’ But there’s also nervous laughter, social laughter, and polite smiles.

Lol’s transformation is less like a shift and more like an evolution. Squirtle became Blastoise. A butter knife became a Swiss Army knife. Dancing 90’s J Lo became triple-threat J Lo? J Lol.

Anyone who spends time on the internet should not be surprised by lol’s dominance. In her book Because Internet, linguist Gretchen McCulloch explains that ...while lol started out indicating laughter, it quickly became aspirational, a way of showing your appreciation of a joke or defusing a slightly awkward situation even if you didn’t technically laugh at it.

When a term that literally means laughing out loud isn’t necessarily used for laughter anymore, it becomes difficult to parse its meaning.

But the nuances are more intricate than just meaning. Two other huge factors of the intended effect are length (e.g., ha vs. hahaha), and capitalization (e.g., lol vs. LOL). When McCulloch conducted a survey in 2017, she found that the youngest group [of survey participants] flat-out rejected the idea of capitalizing lol or using it to indicate real laughter, even when expanded to LOLOLOL, and instead preferred the meanings of amusement, irony, and even passive aggression.

So many variables at play! In this next chart you can go deeper to see not only the market share of each laugh, but the ratio of lower to uppercase usage.