LOL and The World Laughs With You
On Wattpad, humor is a way to connect with others. After all, sharing a laugh is often the quickest way to relate to someone else. In the last 30 days, people spent over 150 million minutes reading humorous stories on Wattpad. That’s roughly 285 years worth of laughter!As the Internet spreads further into our daily lives, the way we convey emotion online becomes all the more important. Today people comment inline instantly with their mobile devices. They LOL, they haha, they react. It all makes you wonder, just how similar is our online laughter internationally?
Since tomorrow is April Fools’ Day, we reached out to our international community team to find out more about how people around the world LOL on Wattpad. Turns out online laughter is itself, kind of funny. Check out their insights below:
How Does the World LOL?
French: In French, you have two defaults. mdr (mort de rire) and ptdr (péter de rire). In English, these translate to either dying or exploding from laughter. Mon dieu, France!
German: A unique chuckle in German can be found in *g* or *grins*. To make their grins larger, some Germans write *ggg* or *sfg* (super fiesen grinsen = super horrible grin). We’re not exactly sure why a grin should be horrible, but it might have something to do with this:
Portuguese: The hahaha in English becomes kkk or hue in Portuguese. According to our experts, theses characters can be repeated endlessly depending on the level of funny. The passive agressive ‘K’sounds a lot funnier in Portuguese.
Russian: Similar to how other languages modify haha, Russian takes the H and throws caution to the wind, replacing it with an X. In Russian, xaxa, xexe, and лол (lol) are your best bets.
Spanish: Jajaja is the Spanish equivalent to the English, hahaha. If you’re asking yourself why, it is due to the J in Spanish being pronounced like the English H (a reminder for the next time you order jalapeños).
Tagalog: Taglish is mix of the Tagalog and English languages. In Taglish the haha is inverted as ahaha, ahehehe, or replaced with loooool.
The Universal Sign of Hilarious: According to our international community team, there is one way to express laughter that transcends language - the keyboard smash. The next time your ribs are splitting with laughter, hit that caps lock button and keyboard smash away, like so: AHAAHKHLDSFFNENAFNAEFNEFLNEGASJKNGSADGN;ALSDNG.
If you’re looking for a keyboard smash worthy laugh, there are over 5.5 million story uploads in the Humor category on Wattpad, with another 200,000 added every month. They’re stories that range from parodies on classic novels, to celebrities trapped in video games. Some provide great comebacks, others laugh about hilarious text conversations.
Check out the millions of funny stories available for free on Wattpad; you’re guaranteed to find a story that will tickle your funny bone.