Internet slang (Internet language, Internet Short-hand, netspeak, or chatspeak) is slang that Internet users have popularized and, in many cases, coined. Such terms often originate with the purpose of saving keystrokes, and many people use the same abbreviations in text messages, instant messaging, and Twitter, Netlog or Facebook . Acronyms, keyboard symbols, and shortened words are often methods of abbreviation in Internet slang.

In other cases, new dialects of Internet slang such as leet or Lolspeak develop as ingroup memes rather than time savers. In leet speak, letters may be replaced by characters of similar appearance. For this reason, leet is often written as l33t or 1337.

In 1975, Raphael Finkel at Stanford compiled a collection, the Jargon File, of hacker slang from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities. Two items on this list in current use as internet slang are "flame" and "loser". By 1990 the Jargon File had been enriched with examples of shorthand used in talk mode between two terminals (for example, "BTW", "FYI", and "TNX") as well as some slang expressions in use on Usenet and new commercial networks like Compuserve (for example, "LOL", "ROTF", and "AFK".)

Similar to 0 things you like: