Texting & Chat Acronyms

What smh, bet, gg and the other texting shorthand actually mean. How to use each one, and which ones make you sound old.

These are the little groups of letters that make texting faster to type and harder for outsiders to read. Some are almost thirty years old. The oldest were born on IRC, an early internet chat system, and in early SMS texting, where every character took effort. They simply never left. Others, like ong and atp, are new enough that half the people typing them learned them from a comment section last year.

Acronyms drift further from their literal meanings than any other kind of slang. Almost nobody typing lol is laughing out loud, and smh long ago stopped needing a real head shake. The entries here cover that gap. You get what the letters stand for, what the acronym really means now, and the tone it carries. Some acronyms read neutral, some read passive-aggressive, and some instantly mark a message as written by someone's parent.

This category also covers the classics without dressing them up. A term like brb is not trendy, and it does not need to be. It is a basic part of how people text. Status labels separate the acronyms still in daily use from the ones that only survive in screenshots of old chain emails.

All texting & chat acronyms terms

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