The venerable Oxford English Dictionary has long been the definitive reference work on the English language. This week, it lent the majesty of its name to “LOL" (laughing out loud), a shiny new entry which will now join OMG, IMHO, TMI, BFF, and other linguistic "initialisms" in the dictionary. And why not? It's a perfectly cromulent word.

LOL is defined as an interjection, “originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: ‘ha ha!’; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.”

The real surprise here isn't the online ubiquity of LOL but its growing offline presence as a spoken word. As this week's announcement makes clear, LOL is now "found outside of electronic contexts, however; in print, and even in spoken use, where there often seems to be a bit more than simple abbreviation going on. The intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology."

The hallmark of the Oxford English Dictionary is the way it illustrates word use over time through the use of quotations. In the case of LOL, the earliest quote that the editors could find comes from the comp.misc Usenet newsgroup on June 13, 1990, where it was included in a “Jargon File Draft” (and was therefore already in use).

But a quote from the 2003 UK novel Freshers reminds us that common abbreviations like LOL can eventually migrate from the screen to our lips. Two characters in the book share this bit of dialogue:

“Wow, man! Are you, like, really from a council estate [a public housing project]?” “Yep.” “Lol! Awesome."

Working at Ars, where we rely heavily on digital communication tools like instant messaging, Internet relay chat, and e-mail, comes with certain downsides. One is the tendency of online expressions like LOL to leap unbidden to our lips when away from the computer. I've personally felt LOL threaten to burst forth on occasion; it may have once even escaped my lips. Not because I was trying to be an "insider au fait" so much as because, after typing it so many times in response to my too-witty colleagues, it became an almost hard-wired, instinctual reaction to comedy.

The urge to "LOL" in public was an embarrassing one, and yet—what's so highbrow about shouting "ha-HA," anyway? Where some see linguistic decline, it's probably more accurate simply to see linguistic changes, changes that have piled into English over the last 500 years from so many cultures, languages, and communities that it's now one of the world's richest languages.

But even if you accept this view and make peace with "LOL" as a spoken word, one problem remains. Is it pronounced "loll" or "lole" or "ell-oh-ell"?