What does that stand for? Your guide to digital shorthand

The Leveson Inquiry revelation made by Rebekah Brooks remains fresh in our minds and is perhaps a mix-up we can all relate to.

She claimed that David Cameron used to sign his frequent text messages to her “LOL” which he took to mean “lots of love”. In fact the abbreviation is more commonly understood as “laugh out loud”.

It’s surprising that the same three little letters have completely opposite connotations, making this blunder all the funnier.

However, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all had a moment of asking ourselves what stands for what when it comes to modern-day acronyms and abbreviations.

With the explosion of mobile and social networking in the last decade comes a growing requirement for speed and brevity when communicating in real-time through instant messaging.

And there’s no sign of this fad fading, thanks to Twitter’s set character limit. Inspired in part by SMS (short messaging services), we are now restricted to getting our point across in 140 characters or less, forcing us to be creative with our shorthand writing, and carving the way for an urban dictionary that has become embedded within our everyday lives.

We abbreviate, remove vowels or - dare I say - use numbers to convey how ‘gr8’ something is.

The evolution of instant messaging, whether you choose to communicate through SMS (short message service) or BBM (Blackberry messenger) has led to a new vocabulary, expressing how we feel through code such as OMG, LMAO and ROFL (see explanations below).

With all this in mind, I’ve collated a handy list of text-speak for you to refer to during everyday conversation.  So the next time someone asks you to M4C (meet for coffee), it’ll save you having to Google it to find out what it means...

OMG        Oh my gosh / God
TMI         Too much information
TBH         To be honest