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Internet slang spreads like wildfire and sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. Some are short-lived, some are used in niche communities, but some go so far as to be included in dictionaries.

Whether you spend time online as a casual user or a marketer enacting a social media strategy, you want to know what different slang and abbreviations mean.

In this post, we’ll discuss how internet slang originates and spreads, define 81 slang words you might come across, and outline what it takes for slang to be added to our dictionaries.

Table of Contents

Is the Internet to Blame?

As we spend less time listening to the radio or watching TV and more time online, the latter has the most influence on our day-to-day dialogue.

The fast pace of the internet also means we adopt words much faster than ever before. “Language itself changes slowly, but the internet has sped up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly,” David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, told BBC News. You can imagine how much longer it took new words to spread through word-of-mouth than it does today with the internet.

How Slang Spreads on the Internet

Linguistics and anthropologists have studied how slang spreads for decades, but it was only possible to measure with precision once public social media networks emerged.

Platforms help linguists accurately and easily search and record language exchanges. For example, Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology examined 30 million tweets from the U.S. to pinpoint the origin of popular slang words and their spread. The image below is the resulting map that shows how terms migrated and their direction of influence.

Slang now moves around within weeks and months instead of years, says Julia Coleman, author of The Life of Slang. “It’s not necessarily that language is changing more quickly, but technologies have developed and they allow the transmission of slang terms to pass from one group to another much more quickly.”

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