“www” has another meaning in Japanese Web

When browsing Japanese websites, especially user-generated ones like BBS, you may see a lot of “w” letter at the end of lines on Japanese text. Such like,

“Blablabla www”

Do you know what they are? Those “w”, “ww”, “www” or longer consective “w”s mean laugh, laugh out loud in Japan.

“www” means Big Smile in Japan

i share Inc. recently researched how people recognizes “www”, with 472 internet users. The result is that 61.2% of ２０’s Japanese thinks “www” as big laugh, against the rest 38.8% think it as “the world wide web”.

The origin of the “www” is, probably,


which means “(laugh)”, pronounced as “warai” in Japanese. Then, people who do not have much time to type in Japanese (well, it takes time to type in phonetic codes first, then convert them into Kanji, Chinese origin letters in Japanese), who were on online-game chat and/or instant messengers, started “(warai)” without Kanji conversion




later, closing brace was omitted


At last, even the opening brace was erased, as you can distinct them from main text easily, because usually main text are written in Japanese letters. So we now have


If you would like to show your laughing more, double it,


If it is LOL, you may want to type three times,


So if you see a sentence like “Oh yes, I am serious. www” in Japanese, it means s/he is not serious at all. www

[See also]

(Warai) on Wikipedia Japanese [J]

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