Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

By STEPHANIE RAPOSO

Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com—a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms—she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”
Ellen Weinstein
Say What?
A sampling of some popular shorthand texting terms.

These are few abbreviations in PAS:
PAPP . . . . . . . . . Pejabat Agung PAS Pusat
JRL . . . . . . . . . . . Jalan Raja Laut
ISA . . . . . . . . . . . Ikut Suka Aku
KBSM . . . . . . . . . . Kahwin Bersalin Sakit Mati
MOSWA . . . . . . . . Miskin OKU Sakit Warga Emas Armalah

UG2BK . . . . . . . You got to be kidding
GBTW. . . . . . . . Get back to work
NMP . . . . . . . . . Not my problem
PIR . . . . . . . . . . Parent in room
GFTD. . . . . . . . . Gone for the day
FYEO. . . . . . . . . For your eyes only
BI5 . . . . . . . . . . Back in five minutes
DEGT . . . . . . . . Don’t even go there
BIL . . . . . Boss is listening
PAW. . . . Parents are watching
99 . . . . . . Parents are no longer watching
PCM . . . . Please call me
IMS. . . . . I am sorry
TOY. . . . . Thinking of you
KUTGW. . Keep up the good work
CID . . . . . Consider it done
FWIW. . . For what it’s worth
HAND . . . Have a nice day
IAT . . . . . I am tired
NRN . . . . No response necessary
4COL. . . . For crying out loud
WRUD. . . What are you doing
LMIRL. . . Let’s meet in real life
^5 . . . . . . High five
“If I would have known it wasn’t safe for work, I wouldn’t have taken the chance of being inappropriate,” says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with—and sometimes police—their children.
One reason for the surge in texting abbreviations—more than 2,000 and counting, according to NetLingo—is the boom in social-media sites like Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters. Text messages, too, are limited in length, so users have developed an alphabet soup of shorthand abbreviations to save time, and their thumbs.
Taking time to learn the jargon may seem like a WOMBAT (“Waste of money, brains and time”). But with over one trillion text messages sent and received in the U.S. last year, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group, you run the risk of feeling out of it if you don’t.
“If a CEO does not appear to be tech-savvy, people may start to wonder, ‘Is the company not plugged into today’s technologies also?’” says Stephanie Grayson, a corporate speech and media trainer based in New York.
Translation Sites
The confusion has given rise to a number of resources that provide English translations for terms like WRUD (“What are you doing?”) and TTYL (“Talk to you later”)—among them independent Web sites like NetLingo.com and