16 Old-School Internet Acronyms

At the time it was published in the late 1990s, the classic Web usage manual Wired Style was cutting edge—but it now has a whole lot of words that we don't use anymore. Here are the top 16 of Wired Style's now-outdated acronyms from the early days of the 'Net. How many did you recognize?

1. Cha

No one said early "websters" were always polite. CHA stands for "click here a**hole." And in the '90s, that click might have been on a "hotlink" or "hotspot."

2. and 3. IOW and OTOH

"On the other hand," Netiquette was still a pressing issue. "In other words," some people were still remembering to offer their "gigathanks."

4. F2F

People still say IRL, another entry in Wired Style, but we've stopped talking about f2f for "face to face," let alone its synonym, "facemail."

5. LAT

We haven't stopped saying "lovely and talented," but somehow the acronym hasn't stuck around.

6. POTS

Wired Style does also contain an entry for the still-current "landline," but we no longer talk about POTS, short for "plain old telephone service."

7. QOS

If you don't have good "quality of service," you might run into trouble promising "I'll zap you the JPEGs but the message file will be 900K."

8. S!MT!!OE!!!

Complete with gradually escalating exclamation marks, this acronym stands for "Sets! My teeth!! On edge!!!"

9. SCSI

Pronounced "scuzzy," this acronym stands for small computer system interface—the type of port that we used before USB ports.

10. TEOTWAWKI

This ungainly acronym stands for "the end of the world as we know it." In another blast from the past, Wired Style notes that it's "the shorthand of Internet survivalists who believe Y2K spells doomsday."

11. TMOT

"Trust me on this," if you want to maintain your membership in the "digerati."

12. TTYTT

This pleasingly symmetrical acronym actually stands for "to tell you the truth."

13. WADR

"With all due respect," no one talks about "meatspace" anymore either.

14. WTFIGO

Oddly, Wired Style contains an entry for "what the f*** is going on?" but no entry for plain WTF.

15. YA

No, it hasn't always stood for Young Adult literature. This acronym used to stand for "yet another": the helpful example sentence that Wired Style provides is "Microsoft released YA browser upgrade."

16. YOYOW

True, perhaps, "you own your own words" (or YOYW, "you own your words"), but thank goodness we're past the days of "cyber-" everything.

Finally, it's almost as interesting to see which now-common internet acronyms Wired Style doesn't include—LOL and ROTFL are present, neither WTF nor OMG get entries.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2022.