No more LOLs: 50% of Facebook users prefer ‘haha’ to laughing out loud

Still using LOL to express laughter digitally? Ha, that’s so old. According to a new study carried out by Facebook, 51% of us express our laughter on the social network with a simple “haha”.

 

The US-wide study, entitled The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter, and conducted in response to a New Yorker article on the subject of “e-laughter”, has collated data on the way de-identified users express mirth. The results are broken down by age, gender and location.

 

The most common form of e-laughter was found to be haha (or longer variants eg hahaha), followed by emoji and “hehe”. LOL (laugh out loud) accounted for just 1.9% of usage.

 

Younger users and women are more likely to use an emoji when tickled; men prefer to use hehe (the writer of the New Yorker piece, Sarah Larson, speculates that this might be down to the fact it consists of the pronoun he).

 

However, while Larson in her piece postulates that hehe is a thing “foisted upon us by youth”, Facebook’s data showed this not to be the case. While the average age of emoji users is slightly lower than fans of haha, users who chose hehe and lol tended to be older.

 

 

Słówka do zapamiętania

express – wyrazić

carried out – przeprowadzone, wykonane

entitled – zatytułowane

mirth – radość

accounted for – stanowić, opiewać na sumę

tickled – rozbawiony

speculates – szacuje

down to the fact – być spowodowane przez fakt

tend – mieć tendencję

 

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How do you communicate laughter?
Let us know in the comment below and try to use the new vocabulary.