“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.
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,
(笑)
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
(warai)
shotened,
(w)
later, closing brace was omitted
(w
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
w
If you would like to show your laughing more, double it,
ww
If it is LOL, you may want to type three times,
www
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]
Author Information Akky Akimoto is one of the first pro-bloggers [J] in Japan. As an individual he writes for Asiajin and his own Japanese weblog. He also produces web services including IvRead.com and Narabe.com. Twitter @akky 6 Responses to ““www” has another meaning in Japanese Web”
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“www” has another meaning in Japanese Web | Asiajin
、アイデアを得るためと日本のウェブの情報を得るために、とある日本の次世代のウェブについていろいろ書いている英語ブログを読んでいるという告白をしています。そこで出てくるwwwは日本では大笑いを意味する」話は、まさに最近アジアジンで書いたばかりのもの。
use in Japanese. When English people mean to indicate humor or that they are kidding, they will often type j/k (just kidding), LOL (laughing out loud, usually not true literally) or just a smiley such as
at the end of the message. In Japanese,this is given as www, which we know in English most familiarly as the world wide web. So now you know the facts about Japanese into English, www.
[Summary] (only for non-Japanese) This is one of Japanese culture on the net. Japanese often uses “orz” but most of non-Japanese don’t seem to know what it means. Visit this site. There are other interesting symbols. ex. )www日本人には説明のいらない、”orz”とか”www”。こことかここに紹介されていますwww
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