With the popularity and rise in usage of real time text-based communications such as instant messaging, e-mail, Internet and online gaming chat rooms, discussion boards and cellphone text messaging came the emergence of a new language tailored to the immediacy and compactness of these new communication media. If you have ever received an instant message or text message from someone that seemed to be in its own foreign language, this guide (
available here) will help you decipher the text chat lingo by providing the definitions to more 500 frequently used chat abbreviations.