Emojis are more popular with women in the US.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: The colloquial dominance of the phrase “lol,” which stands for “laugh out loud,” is coming to an end largely due to the advent of laughing emojis and the phrases “haha” and “hehe,” according to new research by Facebook.
When Facebook extrapolated data from the billions of daily posts to ascertain how its members expressed their humor, and they found that 15 percent use laughter of some kind in any given post.
While “Lol” would have been the de facto slang for laughing in years gone by, now “haha” is far more widely used, being the laughter of choice in 51 percent of posts. An emoji symbol was the go-to in 33.7 percent of posts, “hehe” slotted in at 13.1 percent, while “lol” was used a paltry 1.9 percent of the time.
Facebook also found that emoji are more popular with women than men, Southern states are bigger fans of “lol” than the rest of the United States, and emoji have taken off in the Midwest while “haha” and “hehe” reign supreme in the West, according to CNN Money.
An article in The New Yorker that inspired Facebook’s analysis suggested that we use “ha”s and “he”s as building blocks, adding up the lexical units to convey everything from polite recognition (“ha”) to no-really-I’m-going-a-bit-mad-with-laughter (“hahahahahahahaha”).
“Although interpretation of these different strings can be quite subjective, Facebook’s data showed that even letter counts were more common than odd ones, suggesting that we do indeed stack up these two-letter phonemes like Lego bricks,” reported The Verge.
As Facebook’s researchers explain, “The most common are the four-letter ‘hahas’ and ‘hehes.’ The six-letter ‘hahaha’ is also very common, and in general, the ‘haha’-ers use longer laughter. The ‘haha’-ers are also slightly more open than the ‘hehe’-ers to using odd number of letters, and we do see the occasional ‘hahaas’ and ‘hhhhaaahhhaas.’ The ‘lol’ almost always stands by itself, though some rare specimens of ‘lolz’ and ‘loll’ were found. A single emoji is used 50 percent of the time, and it’s quite rare to see people use more than five identical consecutive emoji.”