There was a time when the term “LOL” was as synonymous with net culture as cat pictures and dancing babies, but these days the term does not see much use anymore, at least according to a recent study by Facebook.

Facebook researchers Udi Weinsberg, Lada Adamic and Mike Develin looked at a one-week snapshot of de-identified Facebook conversations, searching for strings of characters that matched different forms of online laughter, including several variations of LOL, haha, hehe, and so on. They discovered that laughter appears to be an extremely common element of online interactions, and there are many different ways that people write it.

“As denizens of the Internet will know, laughter is quite common: 15 percent of people included laughter in a post or comment that week,” the researchers said in their study. “The most common laugh is haha, followed by various emoji and hehe. Age, gender and geographic location play a role in laughter type and length: young people and women prefer emoji, whereas men prefer longer hehes. People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji, while Seattle and San Francisco prefer hahas.”

The study further found that haha and its variations like hahaha and hahhahaha accounted for 51.4 percent of the laughs used online, hehe accounted for 12.7 percent, and laughter emojis accounted for an impressive 33.7 percent.

Meanwhile, LOL accounted for less than 2 percent of online laughter on Facebook for that week. Unsurprisingly, LOL-ers tended to be a bit older than the people who used other laugh types, with Emoji users tending to be the youngest of the bunch. Women also tended to use emoji more, often combined with other laughter, while men preferred a simple haha.

While plotting the distribution of online laughter might not seem especially important, Facebook’s study demonstrates the value of social media in scientific research for fields like linguistics, which studies the use and evolution of language. Spoken language is incredibly difficult to survey and catalogue, but online text offers a vast library of data to researchers.

Social media is especially relevant to linguists because it is more informal and natural than most types of text online, and thus paints a more realistic pictures of the way different people speak.

Photo by dbrekke