What Do kkkk, jajaja, www and 555 Mean? How the World Laughs Online
Thai people type 555, Japanese users www or 草, Koreans ㅋㅋㅋ, Brazilians kkkk and Spanish speakers jajaja. They all mean hahaha. Here is where each one comes from, how it reads, and when a laugh can come across wrong.
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If a Brazilian friend replies kkkk, they are laughing. So is someone writing jajaja in Spanish, 555 in Thai, www or 草 in Japanese and ㅋㅋㅋ in Korean. Laughter sounds much the same everywhere, but people write it with whatever their alphabet, their numbers and their keyboard make quickest, so the spelling changes from one language to the next. So if you came here asking what kkkk means, or jajaja, or www in Japanese, the short answer is the same each time: hahaha. The longer answer, below, is where each one came from and how it reads.
- kkkk (Brazil): the letter K is called cá in Portuguese, so kkkk reads cá-cá-cá. rsrs, short for risos (laughs), is the quieter version.
- jajaja (Spanish): Spanish j sounds like an English h, so jajaja is hahaha.
- www and 草 (Japan): w is the first letter of warai, laugh. A long row of w looks like grass, so 草 (grass) also means lol.
- 555 (Thailand): the Thai word for five sounds like ha. In Chinese, the same 555 is crying.
- ㅋㅋㅋ (Korea): ㅋ is the Korean letter for a k sound. ㅎㅎ is the lighter version, closer to hehe.
- 哈哈 and XD (Chinese): 哈 is ha, and the count matters, because two on their own can read as a shrug.
What does 555 mean in Thai?
Thai for the number five is ห้า, pronounced close to hâa. Read three fives aloud and you get ha-ha-ha, so 555 became Thailand's written laugh, and a Thai reply of 55555 means something was funny, not that anyone is counting. Rest of World's 2023 roundup of how different languages laugh online and a 2019 BBC News Brasil piece on the same subject both give the string of fives as the Thai form.
Do not carry that reading across to Chinese. There, five is wǔ, which sounds like the crying noise 呜 (wu), so 555 in a Chinese chat is sobbing. A 2020 photo exhibition listed by Time Out Bangkok was titled CHINA 555 for exactly that reason: the same three digits mean laughing in one language and crying in the other. From a Thai friend, 555 means laughing, not crying.
555 (Thai)
Thai for hahaha: the word for five is pronounced like ha. In a Chinese chat the same digits mean crying.
What does www mean in Japanese, and why 草?
Japanese writers used to end a sentence with （笑）, the character for laugh in brackets, to show it was said with a smile. Online, people shortened it to w, the first letter of warai (laugh) or warau (to laugh) in romaji, and repeated it for a longer laugh. So when you ask what www means in Japanese, the answer is lol. It has nothing to do with the start of a web address. The Japanese-teaching column of ALC, a Japanese language-education publisher, traces the same path from （笑） to w.
Enough w in a row, wwwww, looks like a line of grass, and Japanese users took the joke literally: 草 (kusa, grass) now means laughter on its own. You can tack 草 onto the end of a sentence to say that was funny, write 草生える (grass is growing, in other words I am laughing), or go all the way to 大草原 (a great grassland) for something extremely funny. The ALC column adds a caution: 草 can also carry anger or sarcasm, so depending on the context and the person, it can read as laughing at someone rather than with them. With a Japanese acquaintance you do not know well, or on a serious topic, leave it out.
(笑) warai (Japanese)
The older form that w grew out of: the character for laugh, in brackets, at the end of a line.
www (Japanese)
lol. w is the first letter of warai, laugh, so a row of them is someone who cannot stop laughing.
草 kusa, grass (Japanese)
Grass, because wwww looks like it. It means that is funny, but it can also be mocking.
大草原 daisōgen, great grassland (Japanese)
So much grass it turned into a prairie: something was extremely funny.
What does ㅋㅋㅋ mean in Korean, and how is it different from ㅎㅎ?
ㅋ is a Korean consonant letter, called 키읔 (kieuk) and pronounced like k. Korean keyboards let you type a consonant on its own, and a row of them reads like a short laugh you cannot hold in, much like the word 킥킥, which the Standard Korean Language Dictionary of the National Institute of Korean Language defines as laughter that keeps bursting out when you cannot hold it back. So ㅋㅋㅋ is Korean hahaha, and the longer the row, the harder the laugh.
ㅎ (히읗, hieut) is the h sound, so ㅎㅎ is closer to haha or hehe. Rest of World describes it as used much like hehe in English and less common than ㅋㅋㅋ, and the learning site 90 Day Korean suggests ㅋㅋ for extreme laughter and ㅎㅎ for a plain haha. An easy way to remember it: ㅋㅋㅋ for the big laughs, ㅎㅎ for a lighter one.
ㅋㅋㅋ (Korean)
ㅋ is the Korean k sound, and a row of them is a laugh you cannot hold in. More ㅋ, bigger laugh.
ㅎㅎ (Korean)
The h sound: lighter than ㅋㅋㅋ, closer to hehe.
What does kkkk mean? Brazil's laugh, and rsrs
kkkk is Brazilian Portuguese for hahaha. The letter K is named cá in Portuguese: the alphabet in the 1990 spelling agreement signed by the Portuguese-speaking countries lists it as "k K (capa ou cá)", so kkkk sounds like cá-cá-cá. A 2021 BBC News Brasil report traces it to quá quá quá, the way Brazilians had written a laugh in novels, newspapers and comic books for more than a century. In the chat rooms of the early 2000s a single k could stand in for each quá and was much quicker to type, and kkkk took off online.
rsrs is the other one you will meet. It abbreviates risos, laughs, and Berlitz's Brazilian blog describes it as a more restrained, sometimes ironic laugh: closer to a smirk than a belly laugh. Korean ㅋㅋㅋ also comes out as kkk in the Latin alphabet, which is a coincidence: the two developed separately and happen to land on the same letter. So if a row of kkkk turns up in your comments, it is most likely someone writing in Brazilian Portuguese, and they are laughing.
kkkk (Brazilian Portuguese)
Brazil's hahaha. The letter K is called cá in Portuguese, so kkkk reads cá-cá-cá.
rsrs (Brazilian Portuguese)
Short for risos, laughs. Quieter than kkkk, and sometimes a little ironic.
What does jajaja mean in Spanish?
In Spanish, j is pronounced roughly like an English h, so jajaja is simply hahaha. The dictionary of the Real Academia Española lists ja as an interjection used to show laughter, mockery or disbelief, usually repeated, and gives je the same definition, which is why jejeje turns up too. Whichever country the other person is in, if the chat is in Spanish, the laugh is usually spelled with a j.
jajaja (Spanish)
Spanish j sounds like English h, so this is hahaha. jejeje is a laugh too.
How Chinese speakers laugh: 哈哈, XD, hhh and 233
The plain one is 哈哈 (ha ha), which the Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary of Taiwan's Ministry of Education defines simply as an onomatopoeia for laughter. In a chat, though, the count carries tone. In 2022 the Taiwanese trend tracker DailyView (網路溫度計) ranked the most annoying replies to a message: 笑死 (dying of laughter) came first and 哈哈 second. The write-up quotes users who say two 哈 is a brush-off and five or more is real laughter. ㄏㄏ, typed in Taiwan's phonetic symbols, came fourth for sounding sarcastic. If something really is funny, type a few more.
呵呵 (he he) is another dictionary laugh that changed meaning online, in mainland China. A 2019 China Youth Daily survey of 2,006 people found that 55.7% read 呵呵 as dismissive. The Northern Song poet Su Shi wrote 呵呵 dozens of times in his letters, as a People's Daily Overseas Edition column pointed out, but sent to a friend in mainland China today it is more likely to read as an eye-roll than amusement.
Two more come from mainland Chinese internet culture: hhh is the pinyin initial of each ha in 哈哈哈, and 233 refers to a popular forum's laughing emoticon, which was number 233; you will often see it stretched to 23333. XD, finally, is a sideways face: tilt your head to the left and X is a pair of eyes squeezed shut, D a wide-open mouth. This site keeps a whole collection of Western emoticons like it next to the kaomoji.
哈哈哈 hahaha (Chinese)
Chinese hahaha. Two on their own can read as a brush-off, so add a few more when you mean it.
XD
A sideways face: X is a pair of eyes squeezed shut, D a wide-open laughing mouth.
hhh (mainland Chinese)
The pinyin initials of 哈哈哈, hahaha.
233 (mainland Chinese)
Named after a forum's laughing emoticon, number 233. Often stretched to 23333.
😂 vs 🤣: what is the difference?
😂 is Face with Tears of Joy, in the standard since Unicode 6.0 in 2010. Oxford Dictionaries made it the 2015 Word of the Year, the first time a pictograph was chosen, citing SwiftKey data that it made up 20% of all emoji used in the UK that year and 17% in the US. In the Unicode Consortium's published frequency ranking for 2019, it shares the top group with only the red heart.
🤣 came six years later, as Rolling on the Floor Laughing in Emoji 3.0 in 2016. Its face is tilted, after the acronym ROFL, and it reads as a notch louder than 😂. It is also far less common: in the same 2019 ranking it sits one group down, which means it is used less than half as often as 😂.
Which one people pick also depends on age. Emojipedia's 2021 analysis of Twitter found 😭 overtaking 😂 as the most used emoji in a month for the first time, and suggested Gen Z's relative dislike of 😂 as one reason. In mainland China the picture was different: in that 2019 China Youth Daily survey, 37.1% said a plain smiling face now looks cold, and 36.6% preferred laughing-crying, face-palm or big-laugh reactions instead. Younger users often laugh with 💀 or 😭 as well, and the other article here explains those two.
Face with tears of joy
Laughing so hard you cry. In the standard since 2010, and the most used emoji of all for years.
Rolling on the floor laughing
A tilted 😂 named after ROFL: louder, and newer. Emoji 3.0 (2016).
Before you laugh in someone else's language
- Number laughs only work in their own language: 555 is laughing in Thai and crying in Chinese.
- Japanese 草 can sound mocking, and some people find a row of www grating, so keep both for people who know you.
- In Korean, more ㅋ means a bigger laugh, and ㅎㅎ is a lighter one, closer to hehe.
- In Chinese, a bare 哈哈 can seem half-hearted, and in mainland chats 呵呵 often reads as dismissive.
- When you are not sure how it will land, answer with the laugh the other person used first.
Most of these follow the same logic: take whatever your keyboard produces fastest and make it sound like ha. Next time a comment says 555, www or kkkk, you will know someone is laughing, and if you would rather laugh with a face built from symbols, the kaomoji collection has a whole shelf of them to copy.
The illustrations on this page are AI-generated. They are not emoji artwork from any platform.